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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

One question about the Next. How flexible is the hardware in being able to support emulation of other machines? Would it be possible to reprogram the FPGA to emulate say a C64?

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See the Mister FPGA project for what's possible. It supports a huge number of retro PCs, game consoles, arcade games, etc. https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html

However, this effort seems very wrapped in the Spectrum culture. I don't see any indication they want to deviate from that.

If you want a project for that, check out the Turbo Chameleon 64 - that piece of hardware can also emulate a lot of other systems.

https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php?title=Turbo_Chameleon_64

There are 'roms' that can be loaded that will reconfigure the FPGA. The first release has that already.

Thanks that's very helpful - I spotted BBC Master on one of the pages so will do some more research.

It should be possible, there are other cores available:

https://gitlab.com/victor.trucco/zx-spectrum-next-cores/-/tr...

Thanks - that's a great link. Noticed some 6502 based machines on the list.

Really? Get a C64 clone instead then.

The whole point is the renewed Speccy experience in a QL like packaging.

Not too surprising to find Hacker News users asking how they can hack their hardware :)

Yeah, but then get one designed for hacking C64 code on. :)

> FPGA

Eww. I wish they stuck to using a real Z80 chip. (Otherwise they might as well just have emulated everything using an ARM SBC. With a gigabyte of RAM to boot. For 20 bucks.)

The Z80 implementation in the ZX Next has a couple of useful extended instructions not found in the original Z80, and some of the instructions are tailored to the ZX Next hardware (e.g. to efficiently compute video memory addresses). So at least there's a justification for not using real Z80 chips...

My understanding is that they needed to to do this because one of the main chips, the video chip, is no longer available, and since they were using FPGA for that, I assume at that point the cost is driven down by just implementing Z80 in there too, with little loss of quality.

That 20 bucks turns into about 100 added to retail with normal manufacturing price models. Source: Have consulted with several factories, and in several as well.

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