StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It's the mid-90s, and things are looking bleak for the British computer industry in the face of Microsoft's domination of the business and gaming market and the looming spectre of Windows 95, when Sinclair Computers makes a surprise announcement. They have a new model in the works, and boy is it a step up from the Speccy +3! 1MB of RAM incluided with room to expand to two, Compact Flash support out of the box, 256 colour support... Everything you could ever want in a semi-professional software development, music and graphic design or demoscene platform. There's also an expansion port for an accelerator board whose capabilities the company is rather vague about, but claim will be "truly game-changing". The processor is still the same old Z80 family, but the design team claim that they're working with Zilog to create an enhanced but still backwards-compatible derivative that will be competitive with the latest Intel offerings.

And the machine's name? The ZX Spectrum Next.

Meanwhile in the year 2018, an extremely hungover Stuart Ashen is trying to piece together exactly what happened after trying someone's attempt at replicating a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster at a con, starting with why there's a police call-box upside down in the back garden.

We still have our Spectrum in our flat.

We haven't used it for years but it will probably still turn on, with how old electronics were made. If I could be bothered with the elaborate setup that would require (I'd need to FIND a working CRT television with old antenna input...) and if I were insane.

'1MB expandable to 2MB' is the spec of the A500+ released in 1991. PCs were at '8MB standard, expandable to 16MB' by 1995, with a 486 or Pentium in the 50 to 100 MHz range. The Z80 was at 20 MHz max in 1995 and finally topped out at 50 MHz in 2004. There were attempts to make 16-bit and 32-bit versions but they were not successful, probably because the 68000 was much better and already had a lot of adoption. 1995 is a particularly bad time to launch as Wintel was in ascendancy and killing all competing platforms (including nearly MacOS). Niche markets were less addressible due to minimal Internet access. As such this would have sunk like a stone.

Starglider wrote: ↑2018-10-05 03:56pm '1MB expandable to 2MB' is the spec of the A500+ released in 1991. PCs were at '8MB standard, expandable to 16MB' by 1995, with a 486 or Pentium in the 50 to 100 MHz range. The Z80 was at 20 MHz max in 1995 and finally topped out at 50 MHz in 2004. There were attempts to make 16-bit and 32-bit versions but they were not successful, probably because the 68000 was much better and already had a lot of adoption. 1995 is a particularly bad time to launch as Wintel was in ascendancy and killing all competing platforms (including nearly MacOS). Niche markets were less addressible due to minimal Internet access. As such this would have sunk like a stone.

Not if it was selling for the same price they're selling the Next right right now, ie about £250. I don't remember exactly how much we paid for our first family PC around that time but I'm pretty sure it was significantly more than that.

And in any case, they're still reverse-engineering the daughterboard that will offer five hundred meg of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which is hard because it's properly futuristic instead of a hot-rodded take on their own kit. And based on someone else's proprietary tech for that matter, the implications of which some IP lawyers are going to rack up a lot of billable hours figuring out.

Zixinus wrote: ↑2018-10-05 01:37pm We still have our Spectrum in our flat.

We haven't used it for years but it will probably still turn on, with how old electronics were made. If I could be bothered with the elaborate setup that would require (I'd need to FIND a working CRT television with old antenna input...) and if I were insane.

Why? Most flatscreens still have analog tuners built into them. My 4K Samsung connected to my megadrive without issue, took a few minutes to get the tuning exactly right but it worked quite well.