Rating: 2.0 / 5

Available for Windows & Simbian-based mobiles - Speccy Homepage

I stumbled upon this emulator today and was quite interested to see that the program supported Simbian-based mobile phones. Take your Speccy with you on the bus or train! Looking at the emulator, it supports all the normal formats, but really excels in it's support of hardware.

Speccy supports all versions of Joysticks - obviously including the Kempston - and also the Kempston & AMX Mouse. It also supports most of the add-ons you can think of, such as the Multiface. However the Interface 1 is not, so there is no Microdrive emulation.

However, that's pretty much where the praise ends. The sound is awful with the emulated Spectrum beeper the wrong pitch. Also when the tape loads, it sounds really distorted (no wonder there's an option to turn off the sound for the tape.) There is also no auto-play feature when loading a tape and there are no Edge-detection or Fastload options - people who just want to play the game either have to make sure they have snapshots, or be prepared to wait. When playing with the 48K BASIC I also noticed the spectrum delete key isn't mapped to the backspace key on the PC keyboard. Only if you remember the old combination of SHIFT+0 can you delete characters. Nice for the hardcore fan, but new users will probably give up at this point alone. Also emulation of the +2 seems to result in a black screen with no menu or nothing.. Odd.

I think this emulator could be great, especially with the hardware support, and if the sound and basic keyboard emulation is improved will definitely be worth a download. File types supported are the SNA & Z80 Snapshot files, the TAP & TZX Tape files & the TRD, SCL, FDI, DSK, MGT, IMG & $* Disk format files for the +3.

Machines Emulated: Spectrum (16K & 48K - issue 2/3), 128, +2, +2A, +3, Timex TC2048, TS2068 (Official Clones)

Speccy V1.4 Download