In 2016, Victor Trucco and Fabio Belavenuto announced the "TBBlue" firmware, named after the two creators and the colour of the solder mask of the motherboard, a bare circuit board implementation of the product for advanced hobbyists.

With the help of Henrique Olifiers the duo wanted to export the TBBlue to the UK, the ZX Spectrum's original home, having received moderate success with the board in Brazil.

[6] Although initially intended to use the original ZX Spectrum's Z80 chip,[7] the design was altered to use the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA,[8] to allow "hardware sprites, scrolling, and other advanced features to be incorporated within the machine itself".

In the official Raspberry Pi magazine "MagPi", Lucy Hattersley called it "a lovely piece of kit", noting that it is "well-designed and well-built: authentic to the original, and with technology that nods to the past while remaining functional and relevant in the modern age".

[8] In PC Pro magazine, columnist Gareth Halfacree called the Next "undeniably impressive" while noting that the printed manual lacks an index, and that some features are "not quite ready".

[15] Retro Gamer featured an 8-page interview with the creators of the machine about the highs and lows of creating a "true successor to the much-loved Sinclair micro".

[4] Revisions of the Next's motherboard's design are referred to as "Issues", in keeping with the original ZX Spectrum,[16] and have been made to either improve quality or in response to problems with the supply of components.

NextZXOS and NextBASIC were written by Garry Lancaster, and the machine is provided with printed manual covering the OS and BASIC in detail.

Although this does potentially open a sizeable software library of CP/M to the Next users, it is worth noting that CP/M cannot take advantage of the machine's advanced capabilities, such as large memory.

Personalities can match hardware features, timings, memory, graphics and sound capabilities and OS version with the machines to be reproduced in an effort to provide full compatibility with them.

[citation needed] The Next can also be used to recreate a number of other, non-Spectrum based computers, such as the Acorn BBC Micro, as long as their hardware will "fit" into the FPGA.