How to play ZX Spectrum games

The ZX Spectrum has been very popular, with more than 5 million units sold in a 10 years span. Emulating the machine is quite easy.

ZX Spectrum emulators

A good emulator for Windows and Linux is Speccy, another great emulator made by Marat Fayzullin. Some ROM made not work very well, you should install alternatives software, like NO$ZX, or EightyOne. Beware, EightyOne is primarily made to emulate the ZX81, you'll have to tweak the hardware options to emulate the Spectrum.

Mac users can use Fuse, also available on Windows, Unix, Android and more systems, check the official website.

Running ZX Spectrum Games in Speccy

Speccy is really simple to use and most of the time will configure itself to emulate the best Spectrum model for a given game archive. In the following video, we run World Championship Manager immediately.

When a game says to stop the tape, open the Hardware dropdown in Speccy and click on Start or stop tape. Then when the game says start the tape open the dropdown and click on Start or stop tape again. If you press on without doing so, not much will happen.