Making Your Own Spectrum Game - The Dev Tools

Have you been toying with the idea of making your own games for the ZX Spectrum Next computer?

We'll explore some of the various Development Environments available to help you in your mission ranging in complexity and features from simple to comprehensive.

NATIVE HARDWARE

AD-HOC 

In this setup you would need to gather together the following pieces and use them independently of each other. I can't see why anyone would choose this method unless they had a strong desire to use one par

- Editor

- Assembler

- Emulator

- Debugger

IDE (INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT)

"Integrated" being the key word. Eg: ZX Spin contains an emulator, editor, assembler and debugger all in one.

NEXT DEV

For next development you will need some way to execute programs designed to make use of Next-specific features. Here are some options:

VSCode for editing, assembling (with an assembler plug-in) and debugging (with a debugger plugin such as DeZog)

Execute the program in CSpect or transfer to the actual Next via SD card, WiFi or remote serial cable.