Topic: Hardware

It's Shucon party and as usual there are several presentations of new Speccy hw and sw projects. One of them is diZZy's MIDI synth using SIF serial interface connection. It allows user to play 3 AY tones at once with keyboard dynamics possibility. It's very beta, but if you're interested, just look at my blog. There is a YT video. Watch it.

SIF, the Sinclair Serial Interface by Pavel Urbancik has finally a new operating software. It allows the long awaited loading and saving files via FTP over the ethernet. It has an NMI option, terminal, configuration utility, FTP client and browser, can load 48K SNA files and view SCR files.

Velesoft has made a 10 minutes long YouTube video of his new Profi Interface for ZX Spectrum 128 +2 (grey). It has 1MB of RAM and ability to use TR-DOS with TRD images as well as switching to other DivIDE firmwares. And is has all features of his older Pentagon Interface. Watch here. Sadly, these interfaces exist in prototype forms only.

z00m and Ikon have launched a new website concerning add-ons for ZX Spectrum. You can find there just three mods: Memory LEDmap, simple AY interface (with Zilog's Golden Ratio principle - the best sounding AY!) and Universal 48K to 128K rebuild. Go to hw.speccy.cz and pimp your Spectrum!

If somebody's interested, I'd put an article with video about my new internal Pentagon 512K interface for ZX Spectrum +2 Issue 3, made by Velesoft some time ago. It's a prototype only, so you can't buy it, but the compatibility with Pentagon is very high and amost all demos work correctly. Go here (Google translator). Original article in Czech is here.

In April I wrote a news about Sinclair Serial Interface. Its author, Pavel Urbancik, has finished development and some people got their piece of hardware, so did I. There is almost no software for it, but it can be controlled simply by AT commands, so it's easy to make a simple Basic terminal tool. At the moment I'm able to connect to an encrypted WiFi network, ping an IP adsress, load HTML code, etc. I hope someone will write an IRC/e-mail/Twitter client soon. Yesterday I received a message from Cygnus about his SIFTRD which is a tool for making TRD images directly from Speccy on Linux PC with dd command using SIF and serial cable. Which could useful for TR-DOS users.

While waiting for some annoyingly slooow code-compilation, and following a chat with someone about PROM programming, I thought I'd check out the plus3e website. What wonderful timing - I'm only 1 month late with the news that a new version of these lovely replacement ROMs has been released. v1.38 is a minor bugfix, but worthy of a download.
More recently there's been a couple new tools for moving files around your .HDF images via your PC - one is command-line based, and the other is a GUI. I recently had a request to add some features to 3eExplorer, which I aim to do some day when I have a spare moment, but these tools could be just the answer. Available on the plus3e site.

Quick pointer to Papaya Labs, who have new stock of DivIDE boards, fresh and pine-scented. Marvellous.

After a triumphant CSS meetup in Oxford in June, where the ZX Spectrum sent its first tweet to Twitter (in a pub, no less) the Spectranet World Tour continues. This time, the Spectranet will be appearing at RetroEuskal, in Bilbao, Spain. The Spectrum on the Internet workshop will be at 12:00 on Friday 24th July. More info (in Spanish) is here - http://retroaccion.org/node/96

One of the newest Velesoft's projects is a website with all the information about the well known DivIDE interface. You can find here photos, something about history and first prototypes, firmwares, adapters, docs, DivIDE Plus information, emulators supporting DivIDE and many more.