This project aims to build a full-fledged ZX Spectrum IDE that you can easily use on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Besides supporting the traditional ZX Spectrum models (48/128/2/2A/2+/3/3+), Klive IDE intends to be an attractive development platform for ZX Spectrum Next.
The current public release (v0.4.0) is released on September 12, 2020 (changelog).
- You can immediately try it
- You can build the binaries from the latest commit
- Discover the IDE with creating a Klive project
You may ask why we need another ZX Spectrum Emulator and IDE, as we have dozens of them. More or less, you are right. Nonetheless, we have only a few with ZX Spectrum Next emulators that support the developer community:
Cesar and Mike both did and still do a great job with their projects. There is a high likelihood that Klive will never catch up with their excellent emulators, at least not with their features.
Nonetheless, this project offers these benefits to you:
- Features are mostly based on community expectations and feedback. Of course, it does not mean that contributors will implement everything the community asks for, but we try to be driven by user (developer) voices.
- Open source code. The source code is not only available for everyone but is well documented so that you can learn from it. It is an expectation from a contributor to provide decent documentation for any new feature or fix.
- Open for extensibility. The design strives to allow you to add your custom pieces to the IDE.
I've been working for more than three years on SpectNetIDE, which is a Visual Studio 2019 extension that includes a ZX Spectrum emulator and development tools. Though I like this project and will still develop it, it requires more investment (utilizing my free time) than I'm happy to spend:
- Visual Studio Extensibility is hard. Even if it's continuously getting easier, sometimes it still feels pain due to the lack of available samples and documentation.
- SpectNetIDE can be used only on Windows. No easy way to port it to Mac or Linux.
Klive IDE targets Linux, Mac, and Windows. To use the IDE, you need these three pieces of software:
- Visual Studio Code. The widely known and popular coding IDE that is available on multiple platforms.
- The Klive ZX Spectrum Emulator. An Electron-Shell based ZX Spectrum emulator written in TypeScript and native WebAssembly to be the host of your development projects. The emulator is designed especially for integration with development tools.
- The Klive IDE VS Code Extension. The extension that binds VS Code and the Klive emulator to provide seamless development and debug experience.
The project is in its initial phase when we uses proof-of-concept modells to create the initial version. As of know, this is the roadmap — without any deadlines yet:
- (Mission accomplished) The initial POC of the Klive emulator. Main things to gather experience:
- Using web technologies to create a decent UI with a powerful emulator that provides space for excessive hardware emulation (ZX Spectrum Next) (✓)
- Ability to measure how WebAssembly plays its role on this area. (Note: So far measures show that the native WA implementation is about three times faster than the tuned JavaScript implementation.) (✓)
- An easy to use API to support integration with external apps, main focus on VS Code. (✓)
- A series of POC-pieces to find out which VS Code extensibility tools suit the best for particular pieces of the IDE:
- Z80 Disassembly
- ZX Spectrum live memory map
- Z80/Boriel's BASIC source code/Z80 Disassembly debugging experience (breakpoints, stepping modes, watching register and symbol values, etc.)
- Z80 Assembly/Boriel's BASIC source code development experience
- Compilation (Z80 Assembler, Boriel's BASIC integration) — using/implementing an excellent Z80 Assembler
- Tape handling experience
- The first public version of the Klive IDE with these features:
- Running and debugging ZX Spectrum 48 code with the three software components working in orchestration.
- Z80 Assembly integration (syntax highlighting and compilation)
- A Klive IDE version that provides feature-parity with SpectNetIDE
- Moving toward ZX Spectrum Next
You can directly contact me: dotneteer@hotmail.com For discussions, join the Telegram group at https://t.me/kliveide