ZX Spectrum Next

The ZX Spectrum NEXT can not sort the directory listing of a SD card. The machine is just nog fast enough to sort more then thousand or so files. But because most is read only, you can sort the FAT before using it in hte Next:

Running Linux it's just three steps and very simple commands to sort the file allocation table of a partition. I'm using fatsort which is part nearly every software repository.

Here a simple "HowTo".

After installing it, e.g. on Ubuntu via

sudo apt install fatsort

Here a sample - The label of my sd card is "ZXNEXT". It's inserted and can be read...

  • Identify the device name of the partition


mount|grep -i zxnext

The respond is:

/dev/sdc1 on /media/aramis/ZXNEXT type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,r...

/dev/sdc1 is the correct devicename.

  • Unmount it

sudo umount /dev/sdc1

  • Sort the file allocation table (*1)

sudo fatsort /dev/sdc1

Once you have identified the device name, you only need to unmount the card using the "eject- or unmount" menuitem on the desktop and execute fatsort as shown above or use the umount command in a terminal.

Sorting the card of my Next takes about 6s. On the SD card 2.1 GB of data are used. It contains aprox. 34.000 files as I have installed my whole game collection.

By default all directories are sorted on top and the sort is case insensitive. Filenames starting with a dot (".") are sorted by the 2nd character. The defaults depend on the locale and other settings of the system and may be different on your PC/Mac.