ZX Spectrum Next
category: general [glöplog]
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Personally I'm going for it just to have an easier-to-use hardware speccy that runs all the old stuff, and apparently also some of the crazy russian super-speccy stuff.
But that's the thing, if I understood correctly gasman seems to be worried that with all the additions it might actually not run all old stuff correctly, which would be a major turn-off for me too.
Well, at the core it's an FPGA so there could be alternate firmwares/bitstreams for it making it do different things. Buy it for the nice case and the flexible electronics inside, and then make it do whatever you want.
I can understand them trying to pack as much features as possible if their FPGA allows it (and IIRC it got updated to a larger one during the campaign).
I can understand them trying to pack as much features as possible if their FPGA allows it (and IIRC it got updated to a larger one during the campaign).
Yeah, and packing a SID there is a bit pushing it, especially when there's more speccy-related audio hardware out there that they could have emulated instead..
I already mentioned it elsewhere. Including SID into Spectrum Next is actually akin to admitting that C64 guys were right all along and that their sound chip is definitely better than ours. This replaces the competitive demoscene spirit by a shopping list attitude where they just pick cherries from where ever they can find them. Demoscene would not exist if people just went and bought new hardware whenever their hardware stopped doing whatever they wanted to do with it.
What is particularly annoying though, is that they are not very good at picking cherries. The hardware decisions they make show very clearly, the issue is not so much to do with the developers trying to support programmers wishing to make BASIC games. It is more to do with the fact that developers appear to lack understanding of what constitutes typical modern assembly coding for Z80, so they keep adding useless things or ugly things or incompatible things. I would appreciate Spectrum Next better if it was an 8-bit computer with a clean hardware with Amiga 500 league capabilities. However, what we seem to be getting is an ugly mess of awkward and often inefficient decisions.
What is particularly annoying though, is that they are not very good at picking cherries. The hardware decisions they make show very clearly, the issue is not so much to do with the developers trying to support programmers wishing to make BASIC games. It is more to do with the fact that developers appear to lack understanding of what constitutes typical modern assembly coding for Z80, so they keep adding useless things or ugly things or incompatible things. I would appreciate Spectrum Next better if it was an 8-bit computer with a clean hardware with Amiga 500 league capabilities. However, what we seem to be getting is an ugly mess of awkward and often inefficient decisions.
My guess for the SID is that they had this space in the FPGA and a readily available SID core, so "why not". Putting a uSpeech there would have required someone to first make one (as far as I know one is not available).
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what they actually want is an Amiga
Totally reasonable! :D
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I would appreciate Spectrum Next better if it was an 8-bit computer with a clean hardware with Amiga 500 league capabilities.
sounds like "OSCA" (Old Skool Computer Architecture) from the v6z80p project.
http://v6z80p.darkbyte.sk/doku.php?id=osca_manual
...or TS-Conf for that matter.
as long as it can run the multicolor russian demos properly i'm still getting my moneys worth. and will hopefuly use it as an excuse to finally start coding for the speccy.
So is it actually confirmed somewhere already that the ZX Next will support Pentagon timings?
