4 ms·

What is it? Is it a fancy keyboard? Does it have a 6502 except with additional fanciness for I/O?

by nanofortnight 12y ago

afandian 12y ago
The Spectrum had a Z80, not a 6502, and it's got neither of those. It's just a bluetooth keyboard.
- protomyth 12y ago
  Yeah, its a bluetooth keyboard with some apps. I was a bit concerned someone would buy one thinking they had a new computer and not a very odd keyboard choice.
  - janekm 12y ago
    Their website doesn't exactly go out of its way to be clear about what it is, that's for sure.
- beagle3 12y ago
  It's just a bluetooth keyboard. And if it has, say, an ARM controller, then it likely has about 10 times more processing power than the 4Mhz Z80 ZX-Spectrum had. It's comical that you need an additional iOS/Android device with about 1000 times the computing power of the Spectrum to run games with a keyboard that's (likely) 10 times more powerful than the original thing.
  - midnightclubbed 12y ago
    Makes you wonder why it doesn't have an emulator built-in. Hardware on a spectrum is very simple, one Z80 at 4Mhz, and a single asic doing video output. Sound is one bit, either on or off (cpu has to generate the waveforms). Super simple to emulate. Screen layout was crazy though... 6kb monochrome framebuffer, split into 256x256 pixel 3rds (top, middle, bottom - 2kb each). Each horizontal line is 32 bytes one bit per pixel, first line is top of screen, second line in memory is line 8 on the screen, next is line 16, once you get to line 256 you are back up to row 1 on the screen...) Colour was an additional 768 byte block of memory, one byte per 8x8 screen pixels. One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background. Makes me cry thinking about the time I wasted trying to write sprite functions in assembly. Anyways once you have power, bluetooth, modest arm processor and a keyboard all you needs is your hdmi output hardware (and your emulator/loader software).
    - silvestrov 12y ago
      > One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background. No, 3 bits for foreground, 3 bits for background, 1 bit for extra brightness and 1 bit for blink (swaps bg/fg every second).
      - midnightclubbed 12y ago
        Oops sorry, I remembered the brightness bit but forgot it was for both colors at the same time. Ahhh yes and the flash bit :) thanks. The final piece of the video output was the border color (on one of the out ports of the z80). By syncing with the vertical retrace you could 'draw' into the border (most tape loading routines changed the border color as bits were read from the tape to give the familiar border stripes when games loaded from tape).

What is it? Is it a fancy keyboard? Does it have a 6502 except with additional fanciness for I/O?

afandian 12y ago

The Spectrum had a Z80, not a 6502, and it's got neither of those. It's just a bluetooth keyboard.

protomyth 12y ago
Yeah, its a bluetooth keyboard with some apps. I was a bit concerned someone would buy one thinking they had a new computer and not a very odd keyboard choice.
- janekm 12y ago
  Their website doesn't exactly go out of its way to be clear about what it is, that's for sure.
beagle3 12y ago
It's just a bluetooth keyboard. And if it has, say, an ARM controller, then it likely has about 10 times more processing power than the 4Mhz Z80 ZX-Spectrum had. It's comical that you need an additional iOS/Android device with about 1000 times the computing power of the Spectrum to run games with a keyboard that's (likely) 10 times more powerful than the original thing.
- midnightclubbed 12y ago
  Makes you wonder why it doesn't have an emulator built-in. Hardware on a spectrum is very simple, one Z80 at 4Mhz, and a single asic doing video output. Sound is one bit, either on or off (cpu has to generate the waveforms). Super simple to emulate. Screen layout was crazy though... 6kb monochrome framebuffer, split into 256x256 pixel 3rds (top, middle, bottom - 2kb each). Each horizontal line is 32 bytes one bit per pixel, first line is top of screen, second line in memory is line 8 on the screen, next is line 16, once you get to line 256 you are back up to row 1 on the screen...) Colour was an additional 768 byte block of memory, one byte per 8x8 screen pixels. One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background. Makes me cry thinking about the time I wasted trying to write sprite functions in assembly. Anyways once you have power, bluetooth, modest arm processor and a keyboard all you needs is your hdmi output hardware (and your emulator/loader software).
  - silvestrov 12y ago
    > One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background. No, 3 bits for foreground, 3 bits for background, 1 bit for extra brightness and 1 bit for blink (swaps bg/fg every second).
    - midnightclubbed 12y ago
      Oops sorry, I remembered the brightness bit but forgot it was for both colors at the same time. Ahhh yes and the flash bit :) thanks. The final piece of the video output was the border color (on one of the out ports of the z80). By syncing with the vertical retrace you could 'draw' into the border (most tape loading routines changed the border color as bits were read from the tape to give the familiar border stripes when games loaded from tape).