Emulate That Spectrum - Stage Four
You should have tested the emulator before reading this page. If you haven't, please go to the last section for instructions.
With the emulator running, you can load some GAMES. These are loaded in the same way you would open a document in any other program. Several games are supplied with the emulator. Once the emulator has started, click the File menu and select Open. The games included are in the Game Pack folder (on a default install, this should be C:\Program Files\spectaculator.com\Spectaculator 6\Game Pack)
Select any game and click Open. The game will load pretty much instantly (no more waiting for 3 minutes and then seeing R: Tape Loading Error!)
More games
An extensive variety of games can be downloaded from many other websites. The largest of these is World of Spectrum.
Most of the game files are very small, and should only take a few seconds to download. The Spectrum only had 48K of memory after all!
Some of the multi level games (e.g. Outrun) do take a bit longer to download. However, you don't have to insert the cassette, start winding, rewinding, playing the tape and adjusting the volume 78 times to locate the right level, only to find that the tape is corrupted because someone left it next to the TV speaker!
You will also notice that there are different ways of storing each game. Some of these are better than others. The best format to obtain is a TZX file, which is as close as possible to the original cassette. These have the original loading screens, and if desired the coloured stripes in the border can be shown while loading. You can even make a real cassette from them.
Failing that, you will have to use another format, which may or may not contain the complete game. TAP files are usually good, as these are similar to the original TAPe. Z80, SNA, and similar are copies of the Spectrum memory after the game has loaded (snapshots), and so don't have loading screens or other similar features. Additional levels for games stored in this way may also be missing.
The emulator supports most of the file formats - just drag the file to the emulator window and it should work out the format automatically.