explorer/docs/changelog.md

Changelog 📜

All notable changes to Next Explorer, in roughly chronological order.

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🚧 v0.3.0 — Tapes, Hashes & Downloads (unreleased, Feb 2026)

The great "what IS this .tap file?" release. ZXDB downloads become first-class citizens with local mirroring, grouping, inline previews, and now the ability to identify a tape by dropping it on the page.

✨ New

• Tape Identifier — drag-and-drop a .tap/.tzx/.p/.o file onto /zxdb and get instant ZXDB entry matches based on SHA-256 hash lookup 🎯
• Software hashes database — 32,960-row snapshot of SHA-256 hashes for known ZXDB downloads, with a pipeline script (update-software-hashes.mjs) to rebuild/extend it
• Local ZXDB / WoS mirror support — proxy downloads through the app's own API so self-hosted mirrors work seamlessly; inline previews rendered without leaving the page
• Magazine reviews — reviews now shown on magazine issue pages
• Label detail pages — full label view with releases, genre breakdown, and year filtering
• Year filter on releases/entries

🔧 Improved

• Download viewer reworked: grouped by format, inline previews, human-readable sizes
• Local file path resolution corrected for edge-cases
• Silently skip /denied/ and other non-hosted prefixes during hash imports

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✅ v0.2.0 — ZXDB Explorer (December 2025 – January 2026)

The big one. A full cross-linked browser for the ZXDB software database, server-rendered for fast first paint, with deep links everywhere.

✨ New

• ZXDB integration — MySQL via mysql2 + Drizzle ORM; Zod-validated env (ZXDB_URL)
• Entries browser — search, paginate, filter; deep-links to individual entry pages
• Entry detail pages — aliases, web references, relations, tags, ports, scores, origins, facets 🗂️
• Releases browser — filterable by machine type, genre, label, year; download links
• Labels browser + detail — label pages with linked releases
• Genres, Languages, Machine Types — category hubs with entry counts
• Magazines + Issues — stub magazine browser with issue listing
• Cross-linked UI — EntryLink component used everywhere; Next Link for prefetching
• SSR + ISR — index pages server-render initial data; revalidate = 3600 on non-search pages for fast repeat visits
• Multi-select machine type filter with chip toggles; favouring Next hardware by default
• Shared explorer components — ExplorerLayout, FilterSidebar, FilterSection, MultiSelectChips, Pagination 🧩
• Breadcrumbs decoupled from search input
• Landing page for /zxdb with hub links and hero
• Deploy helper script (bin/deploy.sh)
• OG images for register pages (happy new year from Codex 🎉)

🔧 Improved

• ZXDB pagination counters fixed
• Facets filter aliasing corrected
• Case-insensitive search improvements
• Graceful handling of missing releases / downloads schema tables
• Homepage hero updated
• Registers sidebar refactored to share explorer components

🏗️ Infrastructure

• Zod env validation for all ZXDB config
• information_schema.tables check before querying optional tables
• API routes under /api/zxdb/* with Zod input validation, Node runtime
• ZXDB setup guide at docs/ZXDB.md

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✅ v0.1.0 — Registers Explorer (October – November 2025)

The origin story. Started from a Create Next App scaffold with a GPT-5 assist, then heavily hand-crafted into something actually useful for exploring Spectrum Next hardware registers.

✨ New

• Register browser — loads and parses data/nextreg.txt; real-time search/filter with results at a glance
• Register detail pages — per-mode bitfield views (read/write/common), notes, and source modal
• Source viewer — inline modal showing the raw nextreg.txt source for any register
• Wikilink support — links parsed from register definitions and rendered as external refs
• Multi-parser architecture — reg_default.ts for standard registers; reg_f0.ts for the exotic 0xF0 register; easy to extend 🔌
• Multi-line footnote support — parser handles footnotes that span multiple lines
• Deep-linkable search — ?q= query param synced to the search box so searches can be bookmarked/shared 🔗
• Dark mode — cookie-based theme set server-side to eliminate flash-of-wrong-theme ☀️🌙
• Bootswatch Pulse theme — purple primary; react-bootstrap throughout

🔧 Improved

• iOS bitfield fix — prevent Safari turning hex values into tappable phone numbers 📱
• Parser on-demand (lazy load, not at startup)
• Robust case-insensitive search
• Linting and dead code removed; hallucination CSS cleaned up
• Dokku build pipeline stabilised (pnpm store-dir pinned)
• Next.js security bump (Dec 2025)

🏗️ Infrastructure

• Project self-documents via CLAUDE.md / AGENT.md
• Live nextreg.txt used (not bundled snapshot)
• Dev runner fixed for local development