[PAPPPmAc]

I have a copy from the kickstarter, it's the best and most expensive ($175) thing I've ever gone in on crowdfunding for.

Absolutely beautiful books. Great photography, they even worked up their own typefaces and do fun typographic things all over the place. Well written and deeply _deeply_ researched.

I have very few complaints, maybe the section on chorders is a little thinner than I'd like, but that's a pet interest of mine and I've chased down a bunch of material so my perspective is weird.

From the kickstarter updates, the original run were an ordeal to make, but I really do hope there is enough interest for a second printing at some point.

[lproven]

> I have a copy from the kickstarter

Me too. But it cost half as much as my ZX Spectrum Next...

[PAPPPmAc]

I see news about those, mostly from friends doing recreational things with FPGAs. I guess also relevant since they've managed to crowdfund three (substantially upgraded from generation to generation) runs of them.

[lproven]

It's a lovely little machine, and since November there is also a "core" you can load into the FPGA which turns it into a (heavily upgraded) Sinclair QL.

This makes it one of the more affordable ways to get new QL-compatible hardware, 40 years after the machine launched. It has lots of RAM, 16-bit colour graphics, sound, and more. It runs Aurora, one of the 2 FOSS forks of the QL OS.

Work is underway on enhancing the core further, possibly to a 68030 with 16MB of RAM and true-colour graphics (if I remember rightly!) and to improve integration of the upgraded capabilities with the OS and SuperBASIC.

There is some hope it might be able to run SMSQ/E, the other FOSS fork of the original QDOS OS, and that comes with a choice of desktop GUIs.

It's a deeply idiosyncratic OS (never mind predating Windows, it predates the Apple Macintosh) and I have not yet learned to drive it, but I like the idea that my 21st century Spectrum is now also a rather capable full-16-bit machine with a multitasking OS.

The QL is largely forgotten now except by enthusiasts, but it was arguably the first multitasking home/small-business microcomputer, and there is new QL-compatible hardware still on sale: the Q68 machine, also based on an FPGA.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/16/ql_legacy_at_40/

Neither Aurora nor SMSQ/E is seeing much development now, sadly, but then I believe they're in hand-written 680x0 assembly language, and they only run on a handful of long-obsolete hardware, basically QL clones and the Atari ST.

It's an interesting OS and I wish it had been more successful. I also wish that SuperBASIC had been ported to other OSes, since the source is available. I think I'd quite like SuperBASIC for Linux.