Last week I wrote a guide on some online services that allow you to emulate the Spectrum, if you have already tried one of these services then surely you will have gone back in time and you will be moved to relive the video games on which you spent your hours as a boy.
However, online emulators are not the best solution to play zx spectrum from a pc and it is much better to download a good spectrum emulator. In this guide, therefore, I will explain to you in detail how to download and install an emulator for the Spectrum and load games into it.
Index
- Emulate the Spectrum
- Speccy emulator
- Download games for Spectrum
Emulate the Spectrum
There are many free programs to emulate the Spectrum on windows or Mac; the most famous are certainly Fuse and Speccy. Fuse (Free Unix Spectrum Emulator) in particular is perhaps the spectrum emulator that works best; it was born for the Unix platform but is now also available for PC and Mac; for Windows PC I think Fuse is still the best but only the 32 bit version is available and it is now obsolete so the best choice to emulate the Spectrum is to use Speccy.
Speccy emulator
Speecy is a program to emulate the Spectrum written entirely in C; it is portable and therefore does not require any installation and is available for Windows, Linux and recently also for Android.
Speecy allows you to emulate the Spectrum in 16kB, 48kB, and 128kB ZX versions and also Timex Sinclair and allows you to load roms in .Z80, .SNA, .TAP, .TZX, .FDI, .TRD, and .SCL formats.
You can download the Windows version of this spectrum emulator from this address while the Linux version can be found here .
This emulator allows you to load spectrum programs available in various formats as if they were tapes; once Speecy is open you will have to select the tape Loader item
the program loading speed will be very slow because it is the same as the Spectrum, to speed it up press the F9 key .
lately many people prefer to play zx spectrum from pc with the android version of Speecy via an android emulator for pc ; this is because the port of Speecy for Android is constantly updated.
Download games for Spectrum
Once you have an emultarore, to play zx spectrum from a pc you will need to have the roms, that is the images of the programs and games. On the internet there are several sites that offer collections (collected in a zip file) of games for spectrum. I advise you to use internet Archive where you will find all but all the games and programs for ZX Spectrum; in fact there are 12,000 software programs and all with card and screen-shot. You can decide to download a single game or even a collection.
In conclusion, if you want to play zx spectrum from a pc you can use a ZX Spectrum online emulator directly from the browser without having to download any software or use an emulation software, in this case I recommend Speccy which is portable and does not require any installation.