Next on Tap

The Bartender’s Arcade Challenge — for the ZX Spectrum Next

The saloon doors swing open and the thirsty customers come pouring in. You’re the only one behind the bar. Pour, slide, catch, repeat — and don’t drop a single glass!

Next On Tap! is an all-new bar-serving arcade game written from scratch in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum Next. It runs full screen in 320×256 with 256-colour hardware sprites, two AY sound chips and digitised speech.

HOW TO PLAY

Customers march along four bars towards your taps. Hold FIRE to pour a pint and let go to slide it down the bar. Each customer you hit gets pushed back towards the door, drinks up, and sends the empty glass sliding back at you. Catch the empties!

You lose a life if:

• a full pint flies off the end of an empty bar
• an empty glass smashes on the floor
• a customer reaches the taps

Clear every customer to finish the level.

FEATURES

• Four themed venues: the Dusty Spur Saloon, the Final Whistle sports bar, the Cosmic Cantina in deep space and the Neon Nights club. Each has its own artwork, music and regulars.
• Sixteen regulars, including cowgirls, saloon belles, 80s perms, beehive aliens and pop stars.
• Special customers:
  • The Heavyweight — double-width and stubborn, he needs two or three pints to shift
  • The Thirsty Sprinter — races down the bar at double speed and tips instantly
  • VIPs — glowing with a golden aura, they trigger 5 seconds of FREE POUR when served
  • Claude — a bespectacled scholar who rescues stray pints from empty lanes, but stops to write a review note when served, blocking his lane for 3 seconds
• Rush Hour every third level, when a bus load of fast customers floods the bar.
• Tips and power-ups: Happy Hour (customers freeze), Double Points and Slow-Mo.
• Combos of up to x5 for serving without a miss.
• Two bonus rounds:
  • Soda Shuffle — spot the one can that wasn’t shaken
  • Mystic Max’s Magic Cups — follow the pea under the cups
• End-of-level celebration: the barman dances, tosses a glass in the air and heel-kicks it down the bar while the can-can girls kick along.
• Digitised speech: “Next on tap!”, “Happy hour!”, “Bar cleared!”, “Free pour!” and more, played through the Next’s DMA.
• Raster effects: copper ripples when glass breaks, plus a signature border-raster boot intro.
• Music: chiptunes on TurboSound, with drums and effects on the second AY chip.
• Last Orders, an endless mode that keeps speeding up.
• Extras: a high-score table with initials, an attract-mode demo and a mouse that scurries along the counter.

CONTROLS

Action	Keys
Change bar	Q / A
Run along the bar	O / P
Pour / slide	SPACE or M
Pause	H

Cursor keys and a Kempston joystick also work.

REQUIREMENTS

• ZX Spectrum Next (or a compatible FPGA core such as MiSTer) running core 3.x
• 1MB RAM
• Copy nextontap.nex to your SD card and open it from the NextZXOS Browser. It’s a standard NEX v1.2 file, so it works with all NextZXOS .nexload versions.

Tested on real hardware. Speech uses the zxnDMA and won’t play in most emulators.

CREDITS

Created by Roman126 & Claude AI.
Music includes public-domain classics: Oh! Susanna and Camptown Races (Stephen Foster), The Entertainer (Scott Joplin) and the Can-Can (Offenbach). All other music is original.