Yes, Spec-ception! you could emulate Several speccies on the Pi zero, talking to a REAL speccy on the, err, speccy... isn't that how Skynet kinda started?

Picture this, You're in your 40's, 50's, whatever... You have a Wife, young kids and almost zero 'me' time... you're almost a footnote in your own life... Try putting that PCB in the living room by the TV without it getting destroyed More importantly, try getting it past the wife..... Now, the NEXT.. Shove it in front of the TV Let the kids loose on it with little fear and enjoy their journey of figuring out how to use it Let the family embrace your own childhood memories and enthusiasm

There's a certain appeal of having an 'all in one' , 'safe' platform on which to unleash the children. how easy is it on a modern PC to have a totally closed environment in which you can simply boot, type in.. 10 Print "slashdot woz ere" 20 Goto 10 and Run Added that this is an FPGA based platform so effectivley just boots and can be anything an FPGA can be programmed with As for the Raspberry Pi on board - it's an order of magnitude faster than the host machine...and 'why' - BECAUSE... for some - there's a nostalgic appeal to just fire up and play the games you used to play on a large TV - there's a multitude of ways to do that nowadays yes...BUT imagine your younger self - a bit of a hardware geek, ok at the software Just think about the graphics you could achieve if only your spectrum had a sprite handler like the C64 if only your Sam Coupe had a blitter like the Amiga, if you could just somehow hand off the complex mathematics that take 1000's of Tstates to process over to a supercomputer that does it in just ten...(the Raspberry Pi) it's the same as the Spectrum if you want it to be it has a supercomputer bolted on, it has arcade quality graphics processors (80's and early 90's) and you can play with it all from BASIC, just like you hacked back in the day Now, imagine you were annoyed with the chuggish graphics of Hard Drivin', Tau-Ceti or just loved the 3D construction Kit but wished it would render faster... Great, Simply double the speed to 7MHz....Double again to 14MHz....Still too slow?, Fantastic, go render that Mandelbrot set in BASIC at 28MHz then! it's a machine that, if it were presented to the world just a mere 20 years ago would have set the home computer market on fire For me, the spectrum +3 was the machine I really learned 'stuff' on back in the late 80's. It got me into the student innovation awards finals, helped me on my path to a Degree and opened hundreds of doors The Next is everything an more that machine could evolve to if I purchased all the modern add-ons. and importantly The Next is a Retro platform that Looks great in the living room by the TV and has a great Wife Approval Factor. Yes... you read that correctly If you're going through an early midlife crisis and have a penchant for colour-clash and chiptunez from your teenz, the NEXT is one of the few platforms that can fulfil those needs AND stay in the living room without the wife complaining too much! Just try that with a Spectrum 128k and associated tape drives, Kempston adaptors, SD card adaptors Also, it'll run C64 games shortly ;-) Yes, Boot up a sinclair spectrum and fire up Flimbo's quest!