New multi platform emulator - Speculator

[Turtle_Quality]

The author mentioned this on FB -

Developed on a Mac environment, ZX Speculator is also tested on Windows and passes all the ZEXDOC tests and FUSE emulator tests.

Features
Sound: Utilizes OpenAL on Mac and Windows for sound emulation.
Integrated Debugger: Includes a built-in debugger for examination of the Z80 CPU state, including:
Instruction stepping.
Breakpoints.
Instruction history.
Rollback: Die in your favourite game? Accidentally delete a line of code? Continuous recording allows you to 'roll back' to an earlier time. (F1 will roll back 5 seconds.)
Drag and drop file opening.

https://github.com/deanthecoder/ZXSpecu ... pkuEV32Lec

[Ralf]

I've tried it and it is really promising - nice looking, easy to install and use.

Currenlty it supports only basic 48kB model but I guess it may change in the future.

Just the name is unfortunate, easy to confuse with Spectaculator.

[Turtle_Quality]

"Just the name is unfortunate, easy to confuse with Spectaculator."

I did a search here to check it hadn't already been discussed here, and found about 4 or 5 hits where people had mis-typed Spectaculator, plus a couple referring to the Spectrum game Speculator

[GRC7800]

This looks great!

One question, however:

How does one load a multi-load game like R-type? After side 1 loads, it asks to flip to side 2, which I obviously can’t do. Interestingly, the same .tap fie loads up straight to the game on Fuse.

I like the simplicity of this new emulator, but I can’t figure out how to play my favorite game!

[arjun]

Looks spiffy! Love the keyboard and time travel options.I've never heard of the Avalonia framework before, but it seems like a very cool multi platform C# framework. But bugger me, 99 Euros a year? Wow. Makes sense (kinda) if you're a professional .net developer.

Anyway, some feedback:
* The lack of a tape browser or some ways to manually load in blocks of tape data is sorely missed. As GRC7800 pointed out, multi-loads won't work without that - unless you plan to implement an auto-loader of some sorts based on tape loading detection. Maybe just an option to "play tape" (continuing to the next block) would be a good start.

* The emulation speed option doesn't seem to latch on correctly if I switch tapes. I moved it to higher speeds but on switching it would sometimes drop back to 1x (or at least the icons suggested so).

* The emulation speed also seems to trip up some programs from playing correctly if I loaded in the tape at high speeds.

* Flags for some instructions aren't being set correctly and so it fails some tests from Z80 Test Suite program that can be found - along with other useful tests - here.

* Looks like there is no contention support but that can wait!

* I couldn't get Aquaplane to load.

* Zynaps crashed randomly after I started level 1.

Look forward to further updates. Promising start so far. Keep going!

[DeanTheCoder]

Hi there,

* For the most part Avalonia is free - It's only 'out of the box' cross-platform WPF support that is paid-for. It's a great library and definitely worth checking out.
* Multi-load tape support is near the top of my 'to do' list. Most games I like to play don't need it, but it'd be good to support the others.
* The dodgy emulation speed bug was fixed a couple of days ago. I'll make a new release soon.

Thanks very much for the feedback! I have spent soooo long writing it that it's good that others like it too.

[Woodster]

* The dodgy emulation speed bug was fixed a couple of days ago. I'll make a new release soon.

Feel free to join our discord where dodgy emulation bugs are often discussed!
https://discord.gg/Ur4JgYCf

[arjun]

Feel free to join our discord where dodgy emulation bugs are often discussed!
https://discord.gg/Ur4JgYCf

Along with other nonsense, so it's all good fun.

[Woodster]

Along with other nonsense, so it's all good fun.

It's bits of everything. General chat, throw emulation info at each other, help solve each others' problems, talk sh*t, pick on Richard..
Main thing is everyone's welcome to come and join in. Or even just lurk and read up on all the old emulation chat history.

[mjwilson]

Rollback: Die in your favourite game? Accidentally delete a line of code? Continuous recording allows you to 'roll back' to an earlier time. (F1 will roll back 5 seconds.)

Ooh that sounds like it could be interesting for reversible debugging.

[ZXDunny]

It's looking promising, certainly. Getting a few errors in the test suites but if this is an early stage of development, it's going real well so far.

I do hope the author decides to join the speccy discord, the emulation chat in there is incredibly helpful.

[druellan]

I was also testing it (Windows 10) and looks really nice, really surprised how good the beeper emulation is at this stage. Besides things mentioned above, I also found that loading a zip file, sometimes misses the first block.

[zxbruno]

"Just the name is unfortunate, easy to confuse with Spectaculator."

I did a search here to check it hadn't already been discussed here, and found about 4 or 5 hits where people had mis-typed Spectaculator, plus a couple referring to the Spectrum game Speculator

I could swear there used to be an emulator for Mac named Speculator, around 20 years ago. Something that ran on System 7? I can't find it right now. And there was one for the Amiga with the same name: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/tool/98/Speculator

edit: The one for Mac was called Spectacle

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-spectacle