Zedex - ZX Spectrum Emulator

A ZX Spectrum that behaves like a modern console. Save at any moment, put the picture through the CRT you remember, pick up a controller and play. Nothing to set up — every machine boots the moment you open the app.

SAVE STATES

Save states are a grid of cards, each showing the screen it holds, named, renamed and deleted on the card itself. Quick save and quick load sit on the shoulder buttons — Select+R1 and Select+L1 — and are named after whatever is running, so every game keeps its own pair.

SHADERS

Scanlines and CRT with curvature, shadow mask and glow.

The signal: RGB, composite or RF, with colour bleed and noise.

And there is a black-and-white television too.

Scaling runs on the GPU — fitted to the screen, or at a whole number of device pixels per emulated pixel.

Border in full, slimmed to a quarter, or cropped away.

Fullscreen leaves nothing but the picture and your thumbs,

DUAL-SCREEN

On a dual-screen handheld the controls, menu and indicators moves to the second panel entirely.

CONTROLLERS

Plug one in and it works — no mapping screen. Stick, hat and D-pad steer, A is fire, B, X and Y are the extra keys, Start is Enter, and the on-screen pad steps aside.

Hotkeys are RetroArch style: a modifier button plus another, so the game loses nothing.

Twenty-two actions to bind, nine ready to go — pause, quick save, quick load, fast forward while held, fullscreen, keyboard, next profile, next joystick, quit. Fast forward runs at 500% and stays silent.

PROFILES

The joystick comes out as any of the Spectrum's seven interfaces, or as keys. Key profiles cover QAOPM, QAOP and Space, the cursor keys, both Sinclair sets and WASD, and you can copy any of them, edit the eight keys, and delete what you no longer want.

Interface, profile, keyboard and mouse all change from a bar across the top of the window, mid-game.

TOUCH

The on-screen joystick is a thumb pad, fire and three key buttons in an arc.

Four keyboards: the rubber 48K and the 128K plate, each also slim with the BASIC left off.

Every key carries its keyword, symbol-shift character and colour, as the machine printed them.

Two fingers give a shifted key; hold a shift and it latches.

When no keyboard is on screen, a button raises a see-through one over the picture and the joystick stays put.

CHEATS

Cheats for thousands games are built in, matched by the file's fingerprint or by name. Ones that take a number ask for it. Pokes of your own can be fired once or kept on a list.

CAPTURE

Screenshots as PNG, and recording to GIF or MP4, both straight to your gallery.

THE MACHINES

Sinclair 16K, 48K, 128K, +2, +3. Timex, Pentagon, Scorpion, Spectrum SE.

- Speed from 25% to 500%

- NMI

- AY sound in ACB or ABC stereo

- TR-DOS and +3 disks

- DivMMC

- a tape deck that reads and writes

- a Kempston mouse

Snapshots, tapes, disks, cartridges, microdrive images and RZX recordings all open, and the machine changes to suit the file.

Tape loading is instant, safe, or turbo for custom loaders.

The last ten files are one tap away, and tapes and disks can be written back.

NO ADS, NO TRACKING

No advertising, no analytics, no accounts, nothing collected about you.

Zedex is free software under the GNU General Public License. The cheat database comes from The Tipshop. No games are included.