My first experience of emulation was when I discovered the Spectrum emulators 'Z80' and 'JPP' for the PC (around the time of 386 machines). At that time I still owned an Amiga A1200 and there were a couple of decent emulators that I had for that too. Nowadays there are about 32 different Spectrum emulators for the PC alone and they are all listed in the comp.sys.sinclair Sinclair ZX Spectrum FAQ.

There are three of the emulators that I would recommend getting hold of:

• ZX-32 is currently the best Spectrum emulator for Windows 95/98/NT and is available from it's own home page. ZX-32 supports the TZX file format.

• Z80 is DOS based but has more features than any other Spectrum emulator. One of it's best features is that it can load Spectrum tapes in real-time via a special interface for the parallel port. Z80 does not support the TZX file format yet.

• Multi-Machine is for Windows 95/98/NT and is capable of emulating many of the old 8-bit machines, one of them being the Spectrum. Multi-Machine supports the TZX file format and also displays the Spectrum border when it displayed in a window (unlike ZX-32).

The early Spectrum emulators were only capable of loading software that had been saved as a 'snapshot' (.SNA and .Z80 being the two most common). This had the disadvantage that the original loading screen was lost and if it was a multi-load game, it could not be played from start to end. However, it is now possible to store Spectrum tapes in a digital form that can be used as a kind of 'virtual' tape.

There are two main tape formats:

• .TAP was the first tape format and can only be used for standard speed tapes. However, the great advantage of .TAP files is that they load into emulators much faster than the original tape would load into a real Spectrum.

• .TZX is the newer of the formats and can support copy protected, turbo-speed tapes etc. The only disadvantage of .TZX files is that they load at the speed that they would on a real Spectrum. i.e. Slowly!

To convert your old tapes into .TAP or .TZX format there is no better utility then Ramsoft's MakeTZX. Whilst most of the other tools require you to sample the tape first then try to convert it, MakeTZX allows you to load the tape in real-time so you get to see any errors that occur immediately.

MakeTZX also has a useful feature where before you start the conversion, there is a LED type display that allows you to set the volume level correctly. Once you are happy with the volume level, you can start the conversion process and get to see each block being loaded and whether the conversion is successful or not. If the tape consists of only standard speed blocks I recommend that you then convert it to .TAP format using a tool such as TZX2TAP. This way it will load into the emulator more quickly!

If you find any really stubborn tapes that can't be read by MakeTZX, there is a chance that they may work via the parallel port interface of Z80. If this is the case then you should use READVOC (from the registered version of Z80) to read the tape from the parallel interface and store it is a .VOC file. Once this has been done you can try converting the .VOC file to .TZX using MakeTZX.

If MakeTZX can't read the tape data but the .VOC file can be loaded into Z80 successfully, then use the following procedure:

1. Start Z80 and load up Tape-File Copy 128 v3.0
2. Change Z80's tape settings to load from the .VOC file (F6, 'P', 'P', Select .VOC file).
3. Load the tape into the Tape-File Copy 128.
4. Switch on Z80's option to log OUTs to a file (F10, 'X', 'O', 'N', Select .OUT file).
5. Re-save the tape (sends to .OUT file).
6. Convert the .OUT file to a .VOC file using the OUT2VOC utility (from the registered version of Z80). You will need to use the -d and -m options.
7. Convert the .VOC to .TZX using MakeTZX.

To view the contents of .TAP or .TZX files that you have created, the utility TAPER is extremely useful. In order to run TAPER, you will also need to download the utility called DOS/4GW (available from the TAPER download page).

When you are transferring your tapes to the PC, it is a good idea to create some simple .BAT scripts to save you re-typing the same thing over and over. For example; a script to read a standard speed tape using MakeTZX, convert it to .TAP format, then view it in TAPER may look something like this:

echo off

tools\maketzx -r %1.tzx -lnf
pause
tools\tzx2tap %1.tzx %1.tap
pause

tools\taper\taper %1.tzx %1.tap

Well. that's about it on Speccy emulation...

Last Updated: 27th December 1998