What if? That question haunts retro gamers everywhere. What if the companies behind beloved childhood machines hadn’t driven off a cliff in a clown car of bad decisions? ZX Spectrum fan Henrique Olifiers decided to find out, by building an imagined future. And now, after two successful crowdfunders, his evolved ZX Spectrum is back for one final time as ZX Spectrum Next, Issue 3 (from $400/£300).
The device remains a sharply styled reboot in a Spectrum+-inspired case. It runs thousands of old Speccy games with total accuracy, due to FPGA wizardry. But you can also crank things up with new video modes, beefed-up audio, and a 28MHz CPU that would have made Sir Clive’s head spin. That new tech isn’t just for show either – eager fans have made hundreds of bespoke games for the platform, including dazzling remakes of much-loved classics.
But why bring the Next back again? Olifiers says two reasons: “Some people missed out on earlier runs and they now sell for silly money, which isn’t fair on fans. But also, we want to grow the community. The more users we have, the more viable it becomes for developers to create games and apps for the Next that can actually reward their time.”
Cores? Blimey
This latest ZX Spectrum Next will also be the first to ship that’s able to run the full Sinclair lineage, thanks to the new QL Next core. Yes, even the QL, the machine that arguably doomed Sinclair, now gets an outing, giving your Next enough bells and whistles to run the entire QL software catalogue. Assuming you’d actually want to.
The real prize, though, is that the Next will now be able to become its old nemesis, the Commodore 64. To which I say: what? What? “At its heart, the Next is a Sinclair machine, but its hardware can be reconfigured to become other machines. The community asked for the C64 core, and so we built it,” explains Olifiers. He adds that it nails the C64 hardware, including the legendary SID chip, and can run the machine’s entire library of games.
“It is a bit weird having a Sinclair model do this, but also very good,” admits Olifiers, who mulls that at least the C64 got a successor in the form of the Amiga – something denied to the Speccy until the Next rocked up. “But I do also think there’ll be cool stuff to build on the C64 core to make it more powerful than a stock machine. Accelerated modes? Co-processors? More sprites? We shall see!”
Either way, the new Next has to be worth a punt, not least to have a 1980s British playground fight within a single machine, while desperately trying to decide which platform is best – right before someone whacks you around the noggin with an Amstrad CPC.
