Board Testing Phase is Now Complete
Finally we have some good news this year for the backers of the Spectrum Next third kickstarter edition. The original expected shipping date was for Christmas 2025 but this was an overly optimistic estimate, in reality getting the machines tested, manufactured and delivered by then was unachievable. The boards hadn’t even been produced, in fact they hadn’t even been tested by that time. The team that had already been through this twice already however they still were unable to accurately predict how long the process would take. Testing has only just now completed on the 19th of January. A team of about half a dozen product testers have gone through testing the new board all the hardware and software they could get and have found that everything worked fine from Spectrum +3 floppy disk drives to obscure peripherals like the Spectrum VideoFACE.
The extra memory that was added for the new cores was tested and found to be working correctly. The new 12-bit VGA output feature was also tested and found to be working correctly. So now that every feature has been tested and given the thumbs up it has been greenlighted by the team for production. The ever increasing price of gold is putting pressure on the team to start production as soon as possible. This situation is working to accelerate the production of the Spectrum Next as the longer they delay the more it’s going to cost them to manufacture the boards therefore it’s in their best interest to start production as there is a fair bit of gold in each board. This is good news for the backers, because they will not want to have the extra cost of paying more for gold then they need. The quicker that the boards are produced the sooner that the unit’s are assembled and the sooner that backers get their Next’s.
A video of one of the official testers checking to see if a ZX Spectrum +3 floppy disk drive will work on the Spectrum Next KS3 revision.
New Spectrum Next Hardware Enchancements
The Spectrum Next boards are going to be color coded as follows: Magenta Edition boards will be white, Plus and Accelerated boards will be blue and finally Black for upgrade and board only units. The purpose of this is purely for identification purposes so if in future the boards end up being sold in a different case the buyer will be able to tell if the seller is misrepresenting the product or whether or not the unit has been upgraded. The other development has to do with the Commodore 64 core that enables accurate replication of the hardware. The C64 core will have the ability to connect to a real tape drive and IEC bus. The latter is the serial I/O bus on the Commodore 64 that allows connection of disk drives, printers and other peripherals which can be plugged into the expansion port via an adapter that has not been developed yet.
This is also the same case for the Sam Coupé core, it will also be compatible with external hardware peripherals for that system however an adapter is needed and this has not been developed yet. However the Sam Coupé bus adapters will lack some signals including audio, mouse and RGB in order to work due to technical limitations. So, for example, it would not be possible to connect a Sam Coupé mouse or audio peripheral into the bus adapter. Both adapters will be offered as additional purchase options and will be compatible with X-Berry Pi’s and N-Go’s (Spectrum Next clone systems).
Relevant Links
- Spectrum Next Kickstarter Campaign #3 Update #14 [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectrum-next-issue-3-0/posts/4589178] This webpage was the source used to write this article.
