Spectrum Emulation
I'm currently under the belief that the Internet was made for Spectrum emulation. You see, I've had speccy emulators for a while now (Speculator and ZXAM do fine), but I only had a few games, and many of the old classics I used to love
(yes, I once had a Speccy 128k +3 - the one with floppy drive!), I just couldn't find.
On the internet, that's a different story... I'm now enjoying 'The Great Escape' (anyone know how to complete it???), as well as Rampage and various Dizzy incarnations.
But what I really want is a 128k emulator, and at appears that the Amiga does not yet have one of those ;(
One of my favourite games, 'Where Time Stood Still', is sadly 128k only (all those extra memory hungary graphics, you see...) I load it, and get the title screen with the wonderful music, but as soon as the game starts, it crashes with an out of memory error (amusing in a way, considering I have enough memory to house 80 Speccy 128k's...)
I found on the internet a page saying that the emulator ZX Spectrum v5 supports 128k - but I can only find v7! (Anyone know if this is true, or where to get it?). ZXAM author is reportedly working on a new version for 128k, but I've seen nothing yet...
Oh well. Some people have said that all this emulation is a bit pointless considering that you can get real 8 bits for hardly
anything. True, but consider this:
- Speccy tapes took about 5 minutes to load, games from hard disk take about 0.5 seconds. I could probably dash down to my college computer room, get onto the net, find a speccy games site, down load the game and rush back to my room and load it faster than a speccy tape would load...
- Nowadays, snapshot files for emulator use are much more common than tapes.
- And another favourite of mine... Not all speccy games let you
save your position, but the Snapshot format is just that - a snapshot of the Specturm's RAM and Z80 registers. So to save a position, just save the game as a snapshot, and then load it straight in when you're done! Just remember not to overwrite the original snapshot of the game, though...
Anyway, must be off. Rampage and Gift From The Gods await...
Addendum I'm still craving for a 128k emulator, and have realised maybe I could do it via Shapeshifter, given that there is a Mac speccy 128k emulator (Mac Spectacle). Unforntunately, getting downloaded Mac programs to work is like electronic pass-the-parcel. First I de-binhex the file (I can do this on the
'Mac' or my Amiga), then I must decompress the resultant file with StuffIt - I have yet to get the Mac version of StuffIt (as you need StuffIt to decompress StuffIt...) but I found a PC program which did the job. I get the files, and pass it back to the Mac, but the prize still isn't there; the program's stored in
FatBinary format (I think that means 680x0 and PPC versions in one) which has to be split up (a program called Splitter, it says to use). I haven't found any such programs which do the job...
And to think people complain about dearchiving Aminet lha's...
Mark