The ZX Spectrum Next is a new Spectrum, built nearly thirty-five years after the first. Inside is an FPGA, a chip that can be configured to behave like other hardware, set up to reproduce the original machines closely enough to run their software, and then to add the sprites, extra colours and faster processor the 1982 Spectrum never had. Outside is a case by Rick Dickinson, who designed the original Sinclair computers, and his design partner Phil Candy.
Its users paid for it in advance, through three Kickstarter campaigns. The first, in 2017, raised £723,390. The third, in 2025, reached its £250,000 target in seven minutes and closed at £2,612,335. Between them sit years of delays, a keyboard that went through repeated redesigns, and the death of the man who had drawn the case.
Fast facts
- Crowdfunding: Kickstarter, April–May 2017 (£723,390, 3,113 backers); August–September 2020 (£1,847,106, 5,236 backers); July–August 2025 (£2,612,335, 7,524 backers).
- First deliveries: bare boards at the end of 2017; cased machines from March 2020.
- CPU: Z80N, a Z80 with extra instructions, at 3.5, 7, 14 or 28MHz.
- Memory: 1MB on the first machines, expandable to 2MB.
- Graphics: the original Spectrum screen modes, plus 128 hardware sprites, Layer 2, a tilemap and a copper.
- Sound: beeper, three AY-compatible sound chips and four 8-bit DACs.
- Storage: SD card, plus a combined socket for tape.
- Case: Rick Dickinson and Phil Candy.
From a Brazilian clone to Kickstarter
The Next began in Brazil. Victor Trucco and Fabio Belavenuto had built a motherboard called the TBBlue, based on the Microdigital TK95, one of the Brazilian Spectrum clones. With Henrique Olifiers, a Brazilian game designer living in the UK, they planned, “initially almost as a joke” according to Alessandro Grussu’s Spectrumpedia, to turn it into a complete new Spectrum and to bring in Rick Dickinson. Design work began at the start of 2016.
Olifiers was a co-founder of Bossa Studios, the makers of Surgeon Simulator, and, as SpecNext’s own team page puts it, his “very first title was created on a ZX Spectrum clone (TK-90X)”. The team that gathered round the project included Jim Bagley, who had programmed the Spectrum versions of Cabal and Midnight Resistance, and Garry Lancaster, who wrote the operating system, NextZXOS.
The Kickstarter opened on 22 April 2017 with a target of £250,000, which it passed in about a day and a half. The Register reported board-only pledges at £99 and a complete machine at £215, with delivery estimated for July 2018. The campaign closed on 22 May 2017 with £723,390 from 3,113 backers.
The long wait
Bare motherboards reached backers at the end of 2017. The cased machines took more than two years longer, and the keyboard was a large part of the reason.
Dickinson had argued against inventing a new key mechanism, proposing that the team “not attempt to create and develop the intricate and specific engineering detail and tooling required for a modern keyboard”, and instead use existing technology. The first membranes still failed. SpecNext’s developer blog reported in April 2019 that the prototype needed more than 200g of force to press a key, against a rule of thumb of 45–50g for a modern laptop keyboard, because “the pressure required to activate the triple contacts was too high”. The membrane went through several redesigns.
Dickinson did not see the result. He died in April 2018, with the keyboard work unfinished. The finished design is credited to him and Phil Candy, his design partner of more than twenty years.
The wait tested the backers. Craig Turner, writing in Next Magazine in 2024, recalls “moving goalposts” and public arguments in the months before delivery, as Brexit complicated international sourcing and production. Word came around Christmas 2019 that machines would arrive in the first quarter of 2020, and boxed Nexts began to arrive in March 2020, just as the pandemic reached Europe.
The finished case follows the lines and proportions of the Spectrum 128, with four coloured arches on the right in place of the original’s rainbow stripe. Grussu reports that the red arch was made twice during prototyping, because the first came out “in a sort of orange colour, too different from that of previous Spectrums”.
The first campaign also cost its organisers. The Register reported in 2020 that the creators “say they had bad advice about tax on their first go-around and ended up shelling out from personal funds.”
Issue 2 and Issue 3
The second campaign, ZX Spectrum Next – Issue 2, opened on 11 August 2020 in the middle of lockdown. It passed its £250,000 target within minutes. Two days in, Wireframe recorded “over £1.2 million”, and when it closed on 10 September it had £1,847,106 from 5,236 backers. A complete machine now cost about £300, which The Register put down to rising component prices and to tax now being included.
The Issue 2 machines had a new board built around a larger Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA in place of the first machines’ Spartan-6, and 2MB of memory as standard. Redesigning the board for the new chip, global component shortages and shipping problems pushed delivery years beyond the promised twelve months. The machines reached European backers in November 2023. In the meantime, cheaper third-party boards such as the N-Go ran the Next’s FPGA design, and the Next team encouraged them.
The third campaign, ZX Spectrum Next Issue 3, opened at 8am on 19 July 2025. It reached its target in seven minutes and passed £1 million on the first day. The new machine has a larger seventh-generation FPGA, officially licensed Sinclair QL and Commodore 64 cores, and an optional translucent magenta case. It closed on 18 August 2025 with £2,612,335 from 7,524 backers, more than the first two campaigns combined. Next Magazine called it “the third and final” campaign. Olifiers was a little more careful: “right now, the last thing on our minds is a Kickstarter 4, that I can assure you of!”
Delivery was estimated for December 2025. It slipped when the redesigned board took longer than expected, then again over problems with a video chip and with shipping. By August 2026 the machines were in full production.
What is inside
The original Next manual describes three models. The Standard machine has the FPGA, 1MB of memory and all the core hardware. The Plus adds a real-time clock and a Wi-Fi module. The Accelerated adds a Raspberry Pi Zero on an internal expansion port, with its own 1GHz processor and 512MB of memory.
| FPGA | Xilinx Spartan-6 (first campaign); Artix-7 (second); a larger seventh-generation FPGA (third) |
| CPU | Z80N: Z80-compatible, with extra instructions |
| Clock | 3.5, 7, 14 or 28MHz |
| RAM | 1MB (768K free for programs), or 2MB (1,792K free); 16K banks for 128-style paging, 8K pages for the Next’s own memory management unit |
| ROM | 64K for the Spectrum ROMs, plus two 16K alternative ROM slots |
| Sprites | 128, each 16×16, scalable ×2, ×4 or ×8, with mirroring and rotation |
| Layer 2 | 256×192 or 320×256 in 256 colours; 640×256 in 16 colours |
| Tilemap | 40×32 or 80×32 tiles of 8×8 pixels |
| LoRes | 128×96, in 16 or 256 colours |
| Legacy modes | 48K and 128K screens, Timex hi-colour and 512×192 hi-res, enhanced ULA with up to 256 colours from a 512-colour palette |
| Sound | Beeper; three AY-3-8912-compatible chips with stereo output; four 8-bit DACs |
| Other hardware | DMA controller, CTC timers, copper, UART, divMMC-compatible SD interface, Multiface-compatible functions |
| Video out | RGB/VGA and HDMI, at 50 or 60Hz |
The Z80N’s extra instructions go straight at the jobs Spectrum programmers used to write routines for. MUL D,E multiplies two 8-bit registers in eight T-states. PIXELAD turns a y and x coordinate into an address in the Spectrum’s awkwardly laid-out screen memory, and PIXELDN moves that address one pixel line down. NEXTREG writes directly to the Next’s control registers. LDIRX is a block copy that skips a chosen transparent byte, which is how you draw a masked sprite into memory.
A copper, borrowed from the Amiga
The Next has a copper, named after the coprocessor in the Amiga whose job was also to change hardware registers in step with the television beam. The Amiga’s Copper has three instructions. The Next’s has four:
WAIT |
wait for raster line 0–311 and horizontal position h*8: 1 clock |
MOVE |
write a value to a Next register: 2 clocks |
NOOP |
a special case of writing 0 to register 0: 1 clock |
HALT |
a special case of WAIT 63,511 |
The copper’s program memory is 2K, “exactly 1024 instructions”, and its program counter wraps from the last instruction back to the first. With nothing to stop it, a copper program loops for ever. HALT is the fix, and it is inherited from the Amiga. Commodore’s Amiga Hardware Reference Manual tells programmers to end a Copper list by waiting for a beam position that cannot occur, “and this final WAIT instruction never finishes”. The Next gives the same trick a name: HALT is a wait for line 511 of a picture that has only 312 lines.
A copper program can change palette entries, scroll registers or layer order partway down the screen without the Z80 doing anything, so that, for example, different bands of the screen can scroll separately or use different colours.
Speed, and the edge connector
The Z80N runs at the original 3.5MHz, or at twice, four or eight times that speed. It can be switched from a register, from the NMI menu, or with RUN AT in NextBASIC. Games can lock the speed so that players cannot change it.
The fastest mode is slightly slower than it sounds. At 28MHz the core adds a wait state to every memory read, so NOP takes five cycles instead of four and the wiki puts the effective speed at about 21–24MHz.
There is a larger cost when you use the expansion port. On the original Spectrum, peripherals plugged straight into the Z80’s signals on the edge connector at the back, and they expect those signals at 3.5MHz. So on the Next, “enabling the expansion bus (edge connector at the back of the board) will limit the speed to 3.5MHz, to keep signals’ timing compatible with classic peripherals.” Plug in a 1980s interface and the machine runs at 1980s speed.
Sound
The 128K Spectrums had one AY-3-8912 sound chip, controlled through two ports: $FFFD to select a register, and $BFFD to write to it. The AY-3-8912 could already be read back through $FFFD, as Amstrad’s +3 manual explains. The Next has three of them, “whose selection is made through port 0xFFFD”, which gives a program that knows about them nine channels. The wiki records that a SID, the Commodore 64’s sound chip, was tried in the FPGA during development and removed because it took four times the space of an AY. The Next also adds port $BFF5, which reports which chip and register are currently selected.
Four 8-bit DACs, compatible with the SpecDrum, Covox and Soundrive add-ons, play sampled sound.
What the Next adds to the Spectrum
Read the table against colour clash and the design is easy to follow. The Next keeps the original screen so that old software still runs, then adds what Spectrum programmers had to fake: hardware sprites instead of ones drawn by the CPU, a 256-colour layer without the 8×8 attribute grid, a tilemap for scrolling backgrounds, and a copper to change the display mid-frame. A 48K owner had a one-bit beeper; a Next owner has the beeper, nine channels of AY music and four DACs for samples.
The Next also has a following of its own. Mike Dailly, who worked on Lemmings at DMA Design, built the CSpect emulator to develop for it. Next Magazine began in 2024 as a whole magazine about one machine, and new Next games are still being written.
Sources
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 2 (English edition, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), pp. 8-20: the TBBlue origins, the start of design work in 2016, the two campaigns’ totals and backer counts, delivery of bare boards at the end of 2017, Dickinson’s death in April 2018, the case and the red arch (pp. 10-11), the Spartan-6 FPGA (p. 12), the screen layers (p. 16), the Z80N and copper (p. 17), NextZXOS (pp. 17-18) and memory (pp. 18-20).
- ZX Spectrum Next User Manual (SpecNext), chapter 1: the Standard, Plus and Accelerated models and their hardware.
- ZX Spectrum Next wiki, wiki.specnext.dev: “Copper”, “CPU Speed control”, “CPU Speed Register”, “Turbo Sound Next Control”, “Layer 2”, “Tilemap”, “Sprites”, “Memory map”, “SpecDrum/DAC” and “Extended Z80 instruction set”.
- Kicktraq campaign records for ZX Spectrum Next (22 April to 22 May 2017), ZX Spectrum Next – Issue 2 (11 August to 10 September 2020) and ZX Spectrum Next Issue 3 (19 July to 18 August 2025) (web, secondary).
- The Register, 25 April 2017: the first campaign’s pledge levels and estimated July 2018 delivery (web, secondary).
- The Register, Simon Sharwood, 13 August 2020: the tax problem on the first campaign and the Issue 2 price (web, secondary).
- Mike Cadwallader, “Insane in the Membrane”, SpecNext developer blog (specnext.dev), 11 April 2019: the keyboard membrane, Dickinson’s proposal and the activation-force figures (web, secondary).
- SpecNext, team page (specnext.com): the roles of Trucco, Belavenuto, Olifiers, Dickinson and Candy, Bagley and Lancaster (web, secondary).
- ZX Spectrum Next wiki, “Turbo Sound Next”: the SID tried and removed during development.
- Wireframe, issue 42, August 2020, p. 20: the Issue 2 campaign past £1.2 million in its first days.
- Craig Turner, “The Next Wave”, Next Magazine, issue 1, April 2024, pp. 22-28: the delays before the first cased machines, their arrival in March 2020, the second campaign, and delivery of Issue 2 machines in November 2023.
- Adrian Sinclair, “The Feed”, Next Magazine, issue 9, August 2025, pp. 6-10: the Issue 3 launch, its first day and the new FPGA; issue 10, October 2025, pp. 6-7: the final total and backer count, “the third and final” campaign, and the credit to Dickinson and Phil Candy; issue 12, February 2026, p. 7, and issue 13, April 2026, pp. 10-11: the Issue 3 delays; issue 15, August 2026, p. 6: Issue 3 in full production.
- Damien McFerran, interview with Henrique Olifiers, Time Extension, 24 July 2025: the seven-minute target and “the last thing on our minds is a Kickstarter 4” (web, secondary).
- Next Magazine, issue 8, June 2025, pp. 32-35: Simon Butler’s interview with Mike Dailly on CSpect.
- Amiga Hardware Reference Manual (Commodore-Amiga, Addison-Wesley, 1989), pp. 14 and 26: the Copper’s three instructions and ending a Copper list with a WAIT that “never finishes”.
- ZX Spectrum +3 Manual (Amstrad), p. 273: reading and writing the AY-3-8912’s registers through ports FFFDh and BFFDh.