Manufacturing Progress
Starting with the regular, important dates tracking: we’re still firmly aimed at Q3’23 shipping, now looking more firm than ever: the Artix-7 FPGA, the one missing part of the project, is expected to be delivered to our partner’s plant next month (April), two months ahead of schedule (Yay! Thanks for the surprise, Xilinx+AMD!)
As mentioned in the previous updates, all other electronic parts necessary for assembly of the Spectrum Next are already acquired and in stock with our manufacturing partner, with only the Artix-7 pending in order to commence production. With the last piece of the puzzle in place, it will be production time soon.
In the meantime, we haven’t been resting on our laurels. The brains powering Allen Albright and Tim Gilberts thought that the Spectrum Next tape loading circuit, the same design present in most Speccy remake boards out there could be improved with a few tweaks here and there. Loading from tape on the Next is more fiddly than the original hardware, resulting in more of the dread ‘R Tape loading error, 0:1’ messages.
Published in full here: