News ZX Spectrum Next rips through its crowdfunding goal

Looking at the Kickstarter page, it appears that if you're not afraid to do a bit of dremelling then you can actually stick the Next motherboard inside an original Spectrum case Seems like absolute sacrilege to abuse an original shell like that, but I guess there'll be a decent number of dead Speccies out there that could be used for this purpose.

I absolutely loved my Spectrum+. It was my first ever computer, at the age of 8, and was the machine that got me into computer games and programming. But I have to say that I don't really see the point in a new Spectrum these days, other than as a nostalgia trip for former Spectrum owners. If you want to play Spectrum games then emulation is pretty much perfect these days (playing in a browser means you don't even need an emulator as such), and if you want to get into programming then there are going to be far more cost-effective solutions than this (and Sinclair BASIC wasn't great anyway). I wish this project all the best, but it just seems a little redundant to me.

 

I wonder if the keys all fall out when you turn it upside down?

Love the idea but man, that is spendy. One for when it comes out I think.

 

**Checks the price tag**

 

The original cost £125 for 16K & 179 for 48K back in 1982. Is £215 really too much?

 

A couple of years ago I took a BBC Model B and refit it with a Core i3, 8GB RAM, SSD and Windows 10. Had the original Keyboard, speaker and tape drive lights working too. (-:

 

You'll find that the Beeb housing will outlast the next ten generations of PC innards.

 

I assume this has nothing to do with the rather trouble stricken Spectrum ZX Vega+?

 

Yes. In 1982, the Z80 processor probably helped, from a value for money point of view. It doesn't have quite the same impact now that you can emulate the whole thing on a bog standard RPi.

 

Maybe I'm just a jaded and cynical old barsteward, but personally I still can't see the point of owning one of these, beyond satisfying nostalgia. I just don't feel any sort of urge to fire up a Spectrum, despite the countless hours I've spent using one in the past. If I do want to play any of the old classic Spectrum games once in a blue moon (Quazatron being my personal favourite) then I can do so on an emulator. Okay, it might not be exactly the same as sitting on the floor of the living room in my parents' house in front of a 14" TV, fiddling with the volume and tone controls on a tape deck, but times change

And just for the record, satisfying nostalgia is a perfectly valid reason to buy one of these, so I'm not trying to pass judgement here

 

THIS is how you do a retronostalgia product! No X-in-1 TV game boxes, no crap emulators, no stripped-down barebones experience. An FPGA configured to work like real hardware, with a full suite of expansion connectors. Add an SD card reader and HDMI encoder, don't use them instead of the original IO.

Open-sourcing the whole thing is icing on the cake.


Really, there's only one choice they've made that I can find fault with: it's a flipping Spectrum! Sure, it was popular, and there's a lot of nostalgia, but... it is still one of the worst computers ever made.

 

I had not seen it before! It is definitely a neat piece of gear, and I find the dual-purpose "C64 expansion cart/standalone C64" design exceptionally cool.


Seen too many lazy ARM-and-emulator boxes lately. Which, sure it is EASY, but it is such a waste of perfectly good effort. Most recent one was a C64-ish on one of the crowdfunding sites. Crammed an ARM in a custom case and now he's talking like he's created God's gift to Commodore users.

 

I'm inclined to agree.
I'm not immune to retro charm and nostalgia but I do find myself looking at kickstarters like this and wondering whether once the the dust settles exactly how much of that dust will settle on unused hardware with limited scope that seemed like a great idea at the time.

 

NEW DIZZY GAME!!

 

I was quite annoyed the previous Dizzy kickstarter failed, so this is good news indeed!