My ZX Spectrum Next has arrived!

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(OK, it arrived 2 weeks ago, but I forgot to add it to this site).

It’s a dream come true – a souped up ZX Spectrum with all the bells and whistles that allows me to access files as and when I want off an SD card.

It’s what I thought the ZX-MMC would do for my +3, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead. I can see the +3 being sold off once we’re all back to normal, whenever that may be.

Whilst I’m working from home due to COVID-19, I can’t give the machine the full attention that I want to do. There are rumours from work that we might be made to go ‘one week on, one week off’. If this does happen, then I’ll be able to give the machine a lot more of the spare time it needs.

My hats off to Phoebus Dokus as the manual is lip-smackingly gorgeous. As a technical author by trade, it makes me go a little green at the gills 🙂 I just need the time to read it and start programming something in NextBASIC, but that will have to wait a bit.

However, using the good old DZ80 disassembler, I’ve already created some infinite lives pokes for two of the commercial games that I bought and working on the others. These will end up on here as tutorials at some point.

More updates on my progress as the spare time allows!

2 thoughts on “My ZX Spectrum Next has arrived!”

  1. Hey Mug UK!

    I was wondering if you could tell me the most viable way of writing .ST/.MSA/.STX images to actual floppies in 2020 for use with an Atari 520 STFM.

    Any floppy disk drive suggestions? Are there any USB floppy drives that surfaced that can write 720k disks?
    I really want to keep using my Atari floppy disk instead of a floppy drive emulator because hearing the authentic Atari FDD noises is a very big part of the retro experience for me.

    Regards,
    Patrick

    Reply

    • .ST & .MSA files are writable, but .STX is PASTI format and is used to include the various types of copy protection found on disks from back in the day. You cannot write back PASTI files back onto a disk.

      You’re looking at two solutions, USB floppy drives aren’t one of them without fidding about and splitting disk images into smaller chunks then rebuilding them back on the ST. My personal option would be to get a hardware solution like the UltraSatanDisk which uses SD cards and they appear, once a driver is installed, as a hard-drive for your ST. You can copy the disk image files across to the UltraSatanDisk SD card, then use tools like JayMSA to write the files back to original floppy disks.

      There might be other solutions, but this is the one that I currently use. Might be worth a look on Atari Forum for other solutions.

      Reply

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