The ZX Spectrum Next in the flesh!

How it started

In May of 2017, I committed to deliver a remade version of Nodes of Yesod as part of a £620K stretch goal for the successful (the campaign raised £723,390 in total!) first ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter campaign, something Victor Trucco (originator of both the ZX Spectrum Next design and the TBBlue predecessor) tweeted about:

How it’s going

Let’s talk about that. 

In between May 2017 and the date of this post I have made not one but two major job changes, entailing moving between cities hundreds of miles apart. Twice. Perhaps understandably, the side-project of creating a remake of Nodes took second place to these new IRL priorities. Yeah, excuses. Pretty good ones though, as these things go.

That said, some progress has been made, and the update is that I have recently picked up the project again and will start to post the occasional update here (and on my @stevewetherill Twitter) as and when there is progress to report.

For now, here’s a couple of bullet point updates (all subject to change as and when I run headlong into the brick walls that will inevitably present themselves!)

• The Spectrum Next version of Nodes will be written in C (with optimized Next Z80  assembler as and where needed). The reasons for this are severalfold, but my thinking is that 1) the Z80 source code for the original game has long since been lost, and 2) I already have high-level language versions of Nodes in Objective C++, Java (as an Applet, a J2ME Midlet, and even an unfinished but playable Android version), and Flash. In fact, I have already completed a clean port of all the Nodes of Yesod code into vanilla C, it is non-functional because none of the Next specific integration is done (input, graphics, sound, etc), but the compiled size of the binary is encouraging: it is less than 128KB of code and data, not including graphics data