Video

I should at some point, I’ve always avoided obtaining a copy of it as know it’s terrible!

@@stevesretroloft since when has that stopped you 😜

I do have my limits😂

@@PartarioAbdullah-Levi "A man has his pride"

From what I know they emulate the Microdrive so would probably fail in the same way due to the shadow rom not being available (without all the fiddling).

@@stevesretroloft what a pity the if1 didn't have a coprocessor and an extra 16kb of video ram!

Not sure to be honest. The Facebook group for the Next might give you some pointers.

@@stevesretroloft they don't seem very helpful I might be barred

It does seem to be a waste of a pi to just load certain file formats. Not sure how accessible it is from the OS.

@@stevesretroloft there's a pi zero in the zx hdmi from byte delight and one for Sam surely it can emulate a video chip?

Thanks I'll give that a try at some point.

@@stevesretroloft Make it so...

I think our PE teachers back in the 80's loved to dish out that punishment. I got it for making fart noises with my arm pit in the changing room. Thanks Mr Morgan!

@@stevesretroloft Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach PE. I always wondered about the sort of person whose preferred vocation in life is hanging about a load of little boys getting muddy and sweaty in gym gear.

I do wonder if all the educational titles were due to losing the BBC Schools program to Acorn.

I think the educational ones were quicker to code and therefore cheaper to produce.

Not sure to be honest. Although you may be able to setup a serial port on a Linux box to use this async type connection. This unit has a modem built in, but it's the old pulse dial system so won't work on a modern exchange (I also no longer have a landline either - so the linux/unix tty port is probably the only option.

It's been interesting looking at some of these old educational titles.

There's quite a few Sinclair branded things I doubt many of us saw - that said it might been included on the Software 6 pack (along with epic titles like Make-a-chip!)

I think the ZX series of computers inspired a lot of us to work in IT.

I think I remember that being an article in PCW four decades ago. God, I feel old. 👴

@@PartarioAbdullah-Levi I doubt any other generation in history has witnessed the changes we've seen!

Yes, I attempted to load it on a few of my old videos. (Seems all my copies of it are a little unreliable!)

by DURELL software ?

Wonder which came first, the spectrum game of the board game? I hope whilst brief I was able to show what the game does.

Thanks for the tip - I'm still learning with video and sound.

It was certainly one of the classics for the Spectrum.

There's a probably a hidden Thetan level or Audit mode!

@@stevesretroloft mayB, i dunno!!!

Nothing to do with the Scientology UFO cult was ever that cheap!

It does seem Biorhythms was a very 80's thing.

Who knew Biorhythms would be so popular!

There are a few options out there from what I've seen.

Nice collection, I’d love to pick up both an Atari ST and Amiga - although the latter are silly prices now.

@@stevesretroloft Got my eyes on an Amstrad CPC that's been gathering dust in my mate's garage for years.

@@paulj5080 464 or 6128?

I do remember them, never got round to trying one. I do have a BBC so the experience is similar.

@@stevesretroloftI thought the BBC's were put in schools as far as i remember as we had them in ours. The electron i think was the home branded version of it. at least thats what I remember being they are almost identical

@@TechnoAssassin-vx6zf Yes, Acorn won the contract to put a computer in every school and the BBC ran an accompanying programme on TV at the time. The Electron was simplified device (a lot less chips internally) compared to the original BBC - but a mostly compatible device. Sadly it came in to existence just as the boom for the home micro market was over and led to the demise of Acorn as home computer supplier.

@@stevesretroloft damn, you know your stuff 🙈😂👍🏻 top banana

Hopefully I'm not going to start a come back for it!

Mine was the Currys own brand (Triumph) - that said it was a standard shell for many others to badge.

@@stevesretroloft ah! Thank you for the insight!

It has been a much better project overall compared to previous attempts.

It might have had something similar on it now you mention it

Yeah thought it was on horizons too. Probably getting mixed up with foxes and rabbits

@@MarkGodfrey73 There was also a program called "waves" on horizons, which combined two sine waves to make a regular interference pattern.

@@ann_onn think I remember that from my youth but don't remember it on a YT video I watched recently heh

Sorry about that 😆

I didn’t know there was a BBC welcome cassette, I might try to find it for when I get round to doing my BBC master video!

It was the only bit of software that we had for the one at school. I remember there was a brickbat game on it and a poem generator.

And before that on the demo cassette that came with the Video Genie (a TRS-80 clone).

The "horizons" tape! It contained one playable game and a load of dross

To be honest I didn't want the print from my inkjet on my fingers!

@@stevesretroloft 😆

Nice one, its always good to introduce retro to others!

If you have the same expansion bus for the Interface one, then possibly?

That must have took a bit of time - it was quite a big play area!

@@stevesretroloft yes, it did. I remember the crappy joystick too. Does the old game actually play OK with emulators?

@@choboutube I've tried it on an emulator and it does work o.k for me - although I can't get a joystick to work with it.

I suppose you could load from the Microdrive and save to tape as a workaround. Then go from tape to saving it as a .bas file when running in the Next mode.

I'll have a have a look at that, thanks. I do remember how impressed we were we the music at the start of Fairlight.

Thanks Robert.

Maybe my expectations were a bit too high?

You can get it from ZX-Renew - (a UK based website). There's a few others such as Retroleum & Sintech who do parts and other things.

Nice one, I wish I’d started to learn in the 80’s

Not too sure if the aim was make money or just make the device they felt was the natural successor to the Spectrum. Either way it looks to have been priced to cover costs, probably with a bit of money left after the event (Companies house will show the accounts for SpecNext Ltd to see where the money has gone). I think the 8-bit guys problems have been around trying to manufacture as much of it himself rather than outsourcing to a few suppliers - that said I haven't watched his stuff for a while (think the last thing I saw of his was him spending a fortune on a flow soldering station and all the issues around getting that to work). With regards to the design, it probably helps the next was modelled by an actual industrial designer/company. Is it overpriced though? - If you bought through the kickstarter then probably not (or in my case picked one up from someone who didn't want to make money on it) - There's some that paid a high price on Ebay, they have to justify the price they paid I guess. £325 for the full version isn't a bad price for a limited run, well designed device.

These aren't about making money, they are passion projects to reconnect with the past. there are generally no "investors" just people getting together to make it happen. They aren't overpriced, they are priced what they took to make happen.

I'm afraid you're way off m8. I work in electronics manufacture and assembly, with some knowledge of this sector in particular and I can tell you with authority that these things are not overpriced, due to low demand, small economies of scale and relatively high development costs. I'd imagine that the margins on these are not great at that price and the return on initial investment is likely to take a long time.

​​@@andrewgoodall2183i would like to mention that it depends on what one means with overpriced. I am certain that most projects of this kind doesn't make much money out of it in the end, and that in order to cover every cost they have to start there and make a few bucks out of each machine. But I question, is it really worth that kind of money. It becomes a lot of money just to get a feeling back from childhood. In the end it really isn't fun enough for the money spent. Emulators can be quite enough if one put down some time to perfect the setup.

@@larswadefalk6423 Of course, only the buyer can decide what they're willing to pay for something. I happen to know a bit about this project, and I think the guy probably put his price where it is because he went through manufacturing hell because of inexperience, and that deeply affected his margins I suspect. But even if that had not been the case, it would not be a cheap unit because of the reasons I state above. Ultimately, this is the price, and if you want it enough, you'll pay rather than just use an emulator <shrug>.

All it takes usually is someone to show everyone the way - Apple got it right with the iPhone design after everyone else was trying to reinvent the PDA/Phone combo.

Thanks for the info :) I'll keep an eye on it the next time I take a look at it.

Nice, I thought I was being hi-tech with mine! Good to see the actual power of such a device :)

We've got to keep hold of them as they don't make anything this small anymore!

Yes it is a bit pricy, however it's more than just an emulator.

Thought you'd like that. It's still quite usable apart from the screen - maybe I'll check out eBay for the colour LCD version!

I've not considered its water carrying capabilities to be honest.

Sounds a very similar story to me - I might have been 16 when I got my +2 though!

No just the screws that held the original fan in. It might have been a little quieter had I done that (assuming they fit). But I wanted a quick and easy job for now.

The fan kit should have included a 4 pin low-noise adaptor cable in the kit that takes the voltage down to 7-8V@@stevesretroloft

@@jjr5500 I see, I though you meant the attachment of the fan! - I might take a look at that cable - but as I need it to be 2 pin connector I might need to be a bit creative with it. Obviously I didn't read any documentation that came with it!

The Microdrive commands (well the Key words) are in the existing Rom but aren't recognised as commands until the Shadow Rom is attached (Interface one). I know there were a few titles that mentioned wouldn't work with the Interface One attached, the Microdrive expansion pack had a note to that effect. With reference to booting without it, a power down of the device clears the settings that the 2 out commands run so that should do it. With regards to Fuse, emulating the spectrum + interface one is probably easier as there's not much to complicate things, whereas the next as a hardware recreation (via the FPGA) also includes other interfaces (Not sure if the interfaces are emulation or h/w recreation) which in this maybe be causing a few clashes along the way. I suppose if you have the original hardware and plugged a number of physical interfaces in it might have a similar effect. Whether it can be addressed in a firmware update I'm not sure. There's probably a very small number of us trying to use the next with old interfaces as most of the functionality of these devices is more than replicated with the Next anyway. I'm tempted to see if my Ram Turbo and Jet Pac works on it though - that's for another day.

The cable being so short didn't exactly help things!

It's nice to have more additions to the original game, rather than just a straight up conversion.