Reviewing the ZX-HD HDMI for Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Build, Usage & HONEST review - ULA plus
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มี.ค. 2017
- Join me as I build and road test the ZX-HD from ByteDelight.com.
Honest review is this plug-in HDMI interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Sharp graphics incorporating ULA plus!
Buy from www.bytedelight.com
Visit the NEW Spectrum Website www.spectrumforeveryone.co.uk
Visit the Mark Fixes Stuff blog at www.markfixesstuff.co.uk
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Been going through your back catalogue and enjoying them greatly. Nice honest review and build. Thanks for sharing with us.
Thank you so much for your kind feedback!
That is really incredible to see how clear it is in hdmi. Great bit of kit, very professionally reviewed (elsewhere)
😂
The Renegade swearing was the best bit.
I had ideas of doing videos where I talk, set things up, and play, but there was so much swearing between setting up the camera, lighting, kit, games and the gameplay, that I'll have to buy a new mic and plan proper voiceovers, and capture the audio output to mask my live voice.
This video reminded me of the days during lockdown when it dawned on me that I'd have to do that.
Its a beautiful display mate and I love it how it looks like on the telly and and as functionality and package :) I also like the encased DIVMM :) excellent mate :)!!
I do like that little expansion connector to pin adaptor busboard though. One of those with maybe three pin headers for different expansions would be quite neat, then you could have just a few short boards that project vertically out of the busboard for all your expansion needs.
It looks incredibly sharp.
The camera adds noise and doesn't do it justice at all unfortunately It's solid colour without any of the noise you see on the screen.
ahhhh its so nice to find a fellow English man who loves to muck around wioth old computers etc...lots of Americans nothing wrong with that but to hear "Oh Geezer" lol
This is a brilliant product!
Looks like that single IC does all the HDMI, while PI-Zero only acts as a bit of glue logic and maybe also 3.3 volt supply. Sweet mod. Too little too late for me. I gave away my Zed-X systems long time ago. This was a nice video to watch. Thank you.
Actually, it's the other way around.
Nice one looks Amazing I’ve just dug out my ZX spectrum 128k from the loft after 35 years with a box load of game’s only thing that was miss was a plug lol 😂
That is nuts!
Do you know the difference between the ULA Next (on Spectrum Next) and this ULA Plus? Are they different? What happens if you plug in an ZX-HD into the back of the Spectrum Next?
Something wrong with the border effect alignment on "Aquaplane"?
Guess its listening to the Address and Data buses to generate the HDMI output if I am not mistaken. Its the PI software that have been written that is doing the heavy lifting!
U would can also just use a pi to emulate zx spectrum, you can now program it to boot straight to spectrum basic too.
Nice video. I watched the entire thing lol.
Looks like a wicked bit of kit....
20:16 - I was watching this without paying attention to the screen, and thought "hang on... his speccy doesn't have a floppy drive, why can I hear it loading" ;-)
That camera had great quality but the autofocus was rubbish and noisy!
Sound on a 48K Spectrum can and does go through the TV if you connect a cable from the Mic port to the audio in port on a TV. In conjunction with the composite video mod you're laughing. ;)
Back in the day I connected my Spectrum to the phono inputs on my stereo. 100w. It must have sounded awful, but I was so proud.
Would it be sacriledge to hack out the drive bay of a 128k +3 and mount the HD/ULA+ and SD loader in its place? Add a few port headers on the back and away we go..
+Paul Gascoigne if the case was damaged already I’d not have a problem with that, but many people would lol.
hardware interlaced? bbc nula adds 4096 colour palette what about speccy?
Wish I could buy one for my Spectrum :( Done the composite mod in my 48K but the monitors I normally use don't have composite input so it doesn't get out to play that often (that and I have to load from "tape" from my phone LOL)
Yeah, to be honest that are a "premium" product hahah
Looks excellent. Shame about the sound, hopefully they can fix it. Thanks for playing my game too (Toofy2) and there is a ULAplus version of it which will look better.
I think the sound issue will get resolved at some point but it's not a hardship to use some speakers here.
Toofy's Winter Nuts is great fun!
Mark, does the ZX-HD HDMI need a separate power supply or does it take power from the expansion port?
5v from the expansion port. No external supply needed.
Sorry for delay in answering. I was on holiday.
Fupucking great!
Connector looks like it would plug into a zx81 or a timex Sinclair 1000. Has anyone tried it? Are the signals in the same pins? Sure it would be monochrome but then again it would be interesting to see.
It’s not compatible I’m afraid. The systems are wholly different in both edge connector and how the video signals are even generated. A nicenice thought though!
Hey, how come your toast rack doesn't have the red "128K" in the lower-right corner? o_O
Well spotted!
It's the top half of a 48k plus machine as the keyboard died on the toastrack and I didn't have a spare membrane. Keen eyes!
Interesting Video. I think the should have included a Joystick port though, and they could have included DIVMMC though the Pi Micro SD too, giving everything in one box.
The unit is actually working at about 98 percent capacity for the Pi Zero already. It's sniffing the RGB signals and rebuilding the entire image intelligently. Would be nice though!
@@MarkFixesStuff The unit actually cheats and does not read any video signals. What it does do is sniff the Address and Data bus to read the video area in RAM and generate the HDMI from that, so it runs more as an emulator than a video signal decoder / generator. However, compared to the Data being needed to generate HDMI, posting 48K of Data into Ram would be trivial, especially as it would only need to do that when a program is loaded. They use a similar technique on the Amiga HDMI which also uses the Zero to generate HDMI, and the Amiga graphics are substantially more complex.
@Mark Payne Well I still like your channel and your review, and might get one of these one day for my Speccy project. :-)
@@10p6 I can only really review it as a user. I was told the Pi was operating at capacity which was the reason they couldn't quite shoehorn an audio solution in. I might have got muddled up in the last three years as well.
Just wondering why some of the retro projects don't use displayport as it's royalty free. Is displayport difficult to use?
I don’t know but I would guess it might be because it’s not as widely implemented in tv sets?? Just guessing though!
am I missing something? does the ZX-HD work with Standard HDMI Cables, or is there a special new type of HDMI cable needed?
you need a Mini HDMI to HDMI this is included with the package
@@killbotkillbotkill thanks! :)
The HDMI licensing rules are setup so a hobbyist simply can't afford to use a HDMI in their designs. Matthew180 over at Atariage can tell you all about it. It's held up his F18A Mk2 replacement board for the TMC9918A chip for ages.
Imo it would be better if the ZXHD dev manages to route sound into the Pi is to just push the audio through the HDMI signal. Volume control on a 48k? Hell yeah.
Will zx-hd bring sound or do i have to get another connection for that?
Sound isn't brought through. On a 48k it's from the internal computer speaker. On the 128k models you can get it from the jack socket.
Cool.
Hi Mark, I love this video and your Dad joke delivery as usual :) Does this setup also effectively act as a scandoubler? Forgive the noobie question
by the way - i answered my own noobie question - no it doesn't and furthermore it doesn't need to! I have one on it's way in the post - looking forward to trying it
You can get a Raspberry Pi Zero with pre-soldered header
Iain Cowell so I am told. Actually, following this video Ben started supplying the headers pre-soldered.
How about plugging the ZX Spectrum video output to a RGB to HDMI converter ?
That will look like shit, this a far better option.
@@MrFixer1983 : My Spectrum 128k +2B looks great via RGB scart, and has the corrected good sound playback too....and that's into an LG LED 1080p TV. No moire patterns, no soft edges; good colour (as good as a Spectrum can give!!).
If your TV still has RGB Scart inputs, then there's really no need for those HDMI upscaler gadgets, as the TV will do the upscaling natively.... and you get decent audio (mono - unless you mod your Spectrum) too.... looks and sounds great!
No 'shit' involved, unless you're talking about earlier 48k and 48k+ models, where the composite mod is 'decent', but that's all...!!
@@stevesstuff1450 What TV doesn't have SCART? Other than those before the 80s of course.
Do spectrums have RGB out? EDIT: I'm an idiot that apparently wasn't watching the video.
@@bangerbangerbro : The Spectrum +2 series (with built-in tape deck) certainly do, and I think the +3 models do too.
Well, I learned that for 40 years I've been pronouncing "moire" wrong. Thanks for that :)
+Stephen Hargreaves I only say it right because I used to be a projector engineer and worked in France for a bit.
Hi Mark,
Other devices in the spectrum world that use HDMI seem to not work or cause slurring on screen when playing games that rely on ULA timing.
I think my only feedback would be that you didn’t try that. I’d like to see how it fairs compared to the zx-vga-joy you see. Watch nostalgia nerds spectrum next video to see the slurring I’m talking about
Hi Mate.
I don't believe this would be affected in the same way because it's not an an internal process. The output image signals are derived from the edge connector and then buffered and produced by the PiZero. I can't be sure that this is the case, but I do know it operates very differently to other HDMI devices out there, hence some people complain that there is a potential frame of delay.
I would need to look into it. Thank you for the info. I hope you are well and safe?
Mark Fixes Stuff I think you’re right. Read the specs on the website. Seems like they’d already thought of that. Might have to invest, well, when they add audio ;)
Just looking at the efforts to do this make me move on to something else LOL
The concept is to intercept the video signal and route it through the PI; which is OK as interim solution but not really ideal. With the same money you spend for this contraption you can get a ZX Omni directly, and use the output via SCART or convert it to HDMI with minimal efforts. I guess this works for users that want to keep their existing spectrum.
It's all for fun. No one needs any of this stuff to be honest.
@@MarkFixesStuff Agree; although for people that have an original spectrum and have no old tv to use the RF connector, their options are limited
So the Zx Spectrum can finally display orange (as it did in the original brochure) after all these years!
+Elmo Sexwhistle orange is fine but I draw the line at commodore brown.
As I understand it, the Spectrum was always able to display orange - it just required the appropriate flicker rate to a television set to offer that representation to the viewer.
The 3 frame refresh rate meant that all you needed to do, was display the colour sequence red, yellow, red, followed by the sequence yellow, red yellow - cycling from one, back to the other, and so forth.
There is a program called "Splash", which is the program I think you're referring to.
It's available on TH-cam.
I imagine hundreds of different colours can be achieved with this effect - doubling up each time you consider that each part of each cycle, has a BRIGHT 1 and a BRIGHT 0 component to it - INCLUDING black (only just noticeable).
wonder how the next will get round the hdmi if this needs a pi?
It's a good question. Apparently you need to pay a licencing fee to use HDMI.
guess they must of payed it,thanx mark
You know how I use spectrums?
A: With RF
It's not hi Res enough, nor does it have enough different colours for me to care about even composite. Only mono sound as well.
But interesting anyway to see that this is a thing.
But it needs a Pi when it already has an FPGA on the thing?
RF? Hardcore LOL.
I find RF inconvenient and the tuning on modern sets is rubbish. The ZX-HD actually includes ULA plus which has an extended colour palette.
The Pi is building the image from the RGB signals on the bus and creating the HDMI output, I think the FPGA is running the software for the ULA plus and the housekeeping on the spectrum side.
It's a clever thing and after all, why not!
Thanks for watching BTW. I really appreciate it and they time you've taklen to comment :)
@@MarkFixesStuff Oh. Ok. Come to think about it using RF is a bit crap even for spectrum. Pi is basically there for more convenient HDMI encoding or whatever you need to do for it? Is there a way of having the Pi record a video capture itself? I thought my spectrum was broken for a while because the picture on the TV I was using was all bendy and out of sync (especially if you set background colour to black where it goes completely out of sync like when you rewind a VHS without pressing stop first) but later tried on a different TV and it was fine. Which also means that all my Dreamcast RFUs aren't broken either (not that that means they are going to get used much lol).
My Amiga is connected to the same TV with composite and usually works fine. And my Sega Saturn with RGB SCART which is very crisp but as of late seems to be having minor bendy lines too and sometimes white pixels showing up. Which I hope is the TV and not the console of course (not that I want the TV to be broken, just I'd rather it have the fault rather than the computers) and I am inclined to think that. It is a Samsung SyncMaster 730mp. Come to think about it, the name is pretty ironic.
My other TV which is some Goodmans LCD from 2005 or something which is apparently just above 720p and 16:10 aspect ratio doesn't have the same sync problems but just makes any signal you give it look horrible. I can't figure out the right settings. The samsung has the sync problems but it gives a really crisp image. Virtua fighter 2 on the saturn looks amazing.
But that reminds me, the goodmans also seems to make everything flicker in Dreamcast games. VF2 on saturn does this too and that is interlaced so I assume they must be interlaced? BTW I'm not using a VGA box yet which is why they wouldn't be progressive. The samsung however looks fine with VF2, as though it is keeping a full image buffer and jsut changing the lines that are sent to it, rather than displaying only the new frame with lines in between blank or something?
shop.pimoroni.com/collections/raspberry-pi-zero/products/gpio-hammer-header
Here, it's a pin connector for the Pi Zero, that doesn't need soldering. You just (gently) hammer it in, and the pins expand slightly to fit into the holes in the Pi. There's a video explaining it, and comes with a plastic jig to help you fit. Only a few quid, and probably a lot easier than soldering.
I remember it came up a while ago in my Internet travels, and it seems like just the thing for you here. Costs less than a tenner. I have no connection with the company and haven't bought one, but they say it's good and _why would they lie?_
Great bit of kit what was the cost of the two items in the video as I am thinking of reviving my speccy have to get a new modulator which has gone low gain and replace all the caps after 30 years they have gone up in value to twice the original vale also one will not register
Mike
The ZX-HD and the Pi Zero are both available from Ben at Byte Delight.
www.bytedelight.com/?product_cat=zx-hd
There is more electronics and computing power in these addons than there ever was in the Spectrum
Yes. It’s actually hilarious
i like the idea of this but the idea of having to solder something puts me off, I always mess up when I try and solder things
Ben can supply them pre soldered with the headers now. He offers that as a result of this review.
Has anyone tried this with a TS2068 & twisterboard?
It works on the TS2048 without a twister, so chances are it will work on the 2068 as well, but hasn't been tested.
www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=3605
Still don't understand why there isn't one unit, with joystick interface (9 pin or usb), sd card, pi zero, and a hdmi output. Instead of having to run 2 interfaces that cost as much as the Spectrum Next does.
I wonder if someone will come out with a modern revival of the spectrum like the C64 just got?
Yes it's called the ZX Spectrum Next and it's coming out to backers this Jan/Feb 2020(Kickstarter)
C64 mini is a joke isn't it?
Thats JY-3 Amstrad joystick
Pity they didn't include a joystick port on it, maybe even a single USB joystick port that you could map to a single spectrum joystick.
The Pi Zero in these is operating at max capacity I am told. There is a passthrough though, and joystick interfaces are really cheap. You can also get the SD card devices that have them built in now.
But are we losing a certain charm by having it look perfect?
+John Hunt maybe a bit, but the imperfections were hidden well on the old Tube TVs and and a bit more glaring on new flat screens. It also upscales so takes away the soft blurry edges. Always going to be a matter of choice though.
@John Hunt Good point. 90% of Speccy content was created on crappy TVs which means that display artefacts like washed out colours, blurry edges or PAL chrominance encoding in fact became part of the artwork. If I had a choice between composite video and HDMI, I would choose the former. Having said that, kudos to the guys who made ZX-HD available because the technical challenges of such project are not trivial.
You look like a guy from UK that is on " You are the father" show
The really ridiculous thing about using the Pi Zero for this kind of thing is it could emulate the whole Speccy perfectly a billion times over.
Using it as a peripheral instead of the computer is just a million times crazy.
Was thinking the same thing. It's a big old waste of time
No it's not. Cycle Accurate ZX Spectrum emulation isn't 100% on low power devices and you can't emulate a Speccy's keyboard or Kempston Joystick - those are physical.
Keep in mind there is a market for a Interface to connect a real ZX Spectrum to a modern flat screen with a good picture.
This will work on all ZX Spectrums and haves ULA+ support.
The irony is there that the peripheral is many times more powerful than the computer itself, but if you don't see the point of it then you clearly don't see the point of real retro computing. Yes you can emulate a Spectrum, but you can't beat the real deal. There's literally no real or sane reason for using old retro computers in a modern world nor to spend money on them, other than for nostalgic reasons.
@@Skauber it's a shame the zero can't be hoodwinked into doing more for the spectrum.. like a co-processor of sorts.. surely the option is there.. I don't know about ULA+ and what that offers
Lmao at you forgetting the Kempston.
Is this device no longer available?
It’s here! www.bytedelight.com/?product=zx-hd-hdmi-interface-rasperry-pi-zero-complete-set
@@MarkFixesStuff that's great thanks, thought maybe it had been affected by this chip shortage we're experiencing
I could never get on dan dare
I have too dam thing,what you call it Bronchitis,Everything tastes like crap.and coffin all the time..:(
When I looked at your video,I thought it was a hard Drive for the Speccy..:)(shame it should be called ZX-HDMI.it can be misleading,if you don't know about the device.Nice device btw.
I need to test my ZX Spectrum (mine is the same) I wounder if it works.its there a way of using composite with the ZX..? I don't use HDMI for my Retro Stuff,only Svideo for C64 and composite for everything else.I use a EasyCap and connect the Retro computers to my PC so I can use the monitor,and capture a game if I want..:)
Nice video and easy to put together as you watch..;)Thanks..
I suppose yes, although to many people HD is now in their mind as being HDTV, not like us old farts.
The product you are after exists and is called the DivIDE btw.
Cool yeah just us..;) I love the first ZX Spectrum,It cools so cool and how small,I never got one in the 80s,I was a C64 Kid..;)
I had an Electron. My school mate had the Spectrum. I borrowed it for a whole summer once because he wanted to learn BBC Basic!
oh I have one of them,its the same one I got in 80s,Thats where I played Elite for the first time,I got it from my friend,he was not really in to computers at the time.I got cos its was like the BBC B at school..:) I loved the modes the BBC B could do.
PUT SPEAKER ON it..I agree..;)
When overkill is not a powerful enough word for what we have here: a peripheral with 900 MHz ARM running for a 4 Mhz proc ! Seriously ????
Yeah. It’s pretty amazing to think about it. But what the Pi is doing is buffering the raw video and sending it out as HD as quickly as it can. People do ask why not use the Pi to emulate a spectrum but emulation isn’t cycle exactly like real hardware. That Pi is running at about 96% capacity as well.
That's also what makes the spectrum next ridiculous. Well it already is ridiculous without the acceleration option. I mean, I like it, but it doesn't have an excuse to exist if you get me.
What's funny about this is that you can do every bit of it with JUST a Raspberry Pi zero and emulation software (such as Emulation Station). Much cheaper, too. Even if you already have a Spectrum it would be better and cheaper to just use this method. (You can also easily emulate dozens of other systems using the same software on the same hardware, although for the more powerful 16 bit systems you would probably want to upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3.)
Nice to see that there is still a real interest in retro computing! Atari, Commodore, Sinclair and more. Hardware AND software, too! Cool.
JW3HH
People actually do that in Computer Clubs
BTW, stop shaving your hands.
My browser goes apeshit and throws a security warning when I go to bytedelight.com
Weird albertusj! What does it say?
Oh! It's working now. It was unhappy about a security certificate.
If only they had hdmi, sd card reader, and joystick on one unit. I'm wonder if anyone is thinking of hacking the pi to do this. Maybe even add wireless network access. 🤣
Your camera sounds like a old printer....
Irritating isn't it. It does 4k too, but I can't put up with the noise in future.
I just had to check again....Is there really no way to avoid this with an external mic being far away enough?
There would be but the camera doesn't have a socket for an external mic!
Shame, but will be using a different cam in future.
then adhesive tape will fix the focus then. :D