Different ROM in old version of fuse

[Oloturia]

In previous versions of fuse for *buntu, installed from apt, fuse was bundled with a different ROM than the usual Spectrum. The boot screen is like this.


What's the story of this ROM? IIRC Nine Tiles is the company that wrote the original ROM, but it raises a lot of questions anyway. Was the ROM ever commercialized or it was used only for the prototypes? Why was it used for the fuse emulator? What are the differences with the other versions?
At first glance I noticed that apparently the "extend mode" isn't available, while a very annoying "flash mode" for text is present (like True or Inverse Video, but with flash... so you can write flashing characters). INK seems to be missing, I don't know how to change the text colour. The "one key per command" feature is also missing.

It seems to be pretty compatible, but some games crash. I put the ROM in a more recent version of fuse instead of the 16K one, so I can test it just selecting the 16K machine.

[dfzx]

Why was it used for the fuse emulator?

That's the ROM bundled with the Debian FUSE package (Ubuntu is based on Debian) because Debian is rather hot on only using freely licenced code and material. The 1982 ROM isn't distributed under any free licence so Debian needed an alternative. If you don't install the other ROMs package, that's the ROM you get with FUSE on Ubuntu.

I think it's this:

https://zxdesign.itch.io/opense

[1024MAK]

I think that’s “open82”.

“A freely-licenced replacement firmware for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.”
“Just like the original, it is based on the firmware for the Sinclair ZX81.”

See these websites:
https://open82.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/open82
https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/Open82
https://sourceforge.net/p/fuse-emulator ... 323@stanc/

Mark

[Oloturia]

So is it a recent project? I was tricked by the © 1981 year.

[1024MAK]

The 1981 is because a lot of the code is based on the ZX81 code. Follow the links for more information.

Mark

[p13z]

So is it a recent project? I was tricked by the © 1981 year.

Open SE doesn't date back that far, as such, but much of the code does. It is over a decade old now though.
It is a fantastic ROM to use, gives some genius advantages over the standard Spectrum ROM. Fixes some bugs, adds tokenisation and reutilises the MOVE token as an LDIR command, which would have been an utter game changer for writing things in BASIC back in the day.
eg. this (half finished) demo was written with a single page of pure BASIC on my +3: https://youtu.be/lX-9RgdLtHs?si=f6Yas1rwqp4lJp2l