David Hayward finds another excuse to play on his Spectrum (not that he needs one)
It's no secret that I'm somewhat fond of the ZX Spectrum, as I'm sure many of you reading this are. It was, after all, a huge part of my childhood and the beginning of my obsession with all things technological.
Emulators are how most people experience the Spectrum these days, since the actual hardware can be difficult to get up and running in a modern setting. That doesn't quite have the same 'feel' to it, though. There's nothing quite like dragging the old 128K 'toastie' off the shelf, blowing off the dust and connecting the dodgy, equally aged, power brick to it. However, while I have a fairly extensive collection of original tapes that I've accrued over the years, there are a few missing favourites from my collection. In order to play these missing games, I have always had to turn to my trusty PC and Emulation, but that's not the case anymore.
PlayZX
PlayZX, from Baltazar Studios and developer Goran Devic is an app that'll convert any TAP or TZX file to its audio parts. This means that you to connect your Spectrum's audio line to the headphone socket of your phone or tablet and load up any TAP or TZX file into the original spectrum hardware in the same way as you would if you had the tape running through a cassette player. Brilliant. Even better is that PlayZX will let you search through more than ten thousand Spectrum titles online and then convert the file on the fly to its audio equivalent for you to play as Sir Clive intended.
If you're hunting for that elusive copy of Gobble A Ghost or your tape copy has been stretched to the point where it's utterly unreadable, then all you need do is install PlayZX, search for the game, and enter 'Load' into the Spectrum and tap the Play button on the tape icon. The audio has been significantly boosted to allow the Spectrum to pick it up correctly, as a problem with a lot of modern tape hardware is the lack of decent amplification. So far, we've tested it with well over a dozen titles and each has loaded perfectly.
Furthermore, you can even search for games by year, publisher, duration of the loading, genre and rating, allowing you to browse the archive in some interesting ways. The rating search is based on your own choice of game, for example if you find a game you love you can award it five stars and it'll be auto-saved to your Favourites tab in the app. You can then search a game by the number of stars you've awarded.
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If you're into Spectrum gaming, then this is the app for you. Forget about all that emulation stuff, PlayZX neatly brings together the modern with the retro and lets you play your Speccy games on the original hardware - the way they were meant to be.
Features At A Glance
• Convert your TAP and TZX files to Spectrum-compatible audio
• Over 10,000 titles to search through
• Pause and resume the 'tape' playback at any time
• Write your own MySQL queries for better searching