You can even connect a PS4 controller over bluetooth. ) or any other gadget that now claims to be smart, there’s no point looking any further than Marvin – one of the oldest, and certainly the most popular and best-supported emulator for the platform. If you are on an Android device – be it phone, phablet, tablet, e-book reader, smart TV, (snip! Ed. We’ll start with the most obvious mobile solution, simply because there is a surprising lack of choice.

So, without further ado, and in no particular order… Smartphones – Android and iOS Image credit

At SFEO, we have thrown together our own list of systems on which you can play your beloved Spectrum, without dropping a load of cash or waiting an age for an appropriate system to be released. There has been a recent increase in modern retro consoles, particularly of the handheld variety, reproducing retro hardware with modern technology, or (in some cases) using a software emulator on a cheap generic mini computer.Įmulating machines on existing handhelds has been possible for a long while, and is far easier than most people think. I suspect we whiled away the collective hours of loading time arguing about who would get to play first (him, invariably).Share the post 'Spectrum Gaming On The Move' My brother and I must have played hundreds of different Spectrum games during the Speccy's glory years, until it was eventually replaced in our affections with an Atari ST. But on the flip side, the most melodious sound was not music - it was the exciting, electro scramble buurr-bip! buuurrr-bip! of a game in the midst of loading.

The most hated phrase of my youth was not 'go to your room', it was 'R Tape Loading Error'. Apart from cash, or blank tapes and Speccy-owning mates, you also needed a truck-load of patience to plough into the Spectrum gaming cause, because each game took minutes to load, if it loaded at all. It boasted a handful of colours, blocky sprites and ran Sinclair Basic, a command line OS which encouraged you to come up with your own programs (mine never got more sophisticated than: '10 print 'hello' 20 goto 10').Īll you had to do was hook this techno slab up to a TV and cassette player and watch it siphon away your pocket money into a massive cassette collection of games. If like me you grew up in the UK in the 80s, cutting-edge computer gaming was all about the ZX Spectrum - an 8-bit, rubber-keyed rectangle of unadulterated gaming joy.

Play zx spectrum online