ZXBox

Description

A port of Spectemu ZX Spectrum 48k emulator. This a viewer plugin - you can't see it in 'plugins' menu. For using it you must get a tape (tzx,tap) or snapshot (sna,z80) file. You can get some at World of Spectrum archive: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/archive.html

Keys

You can use 5 buttons ingame : Up, Down, Left, Right, Jump/Fire. And one button for accessing menu. They correspond to different actuall buttons on different targets:

Target	Up	Down	Left	Right	Jump/Fire	Menu
iPods	Menu	Play	<<	>>	Select	Hold
H100s/H300s	Up	Down	Left	Right	Play	A-B

Each of it you can map to one key of Spectrum Keyboard or map whole keymap to Kempston joystick.

Menu Actions

Vkeyboard

This is a virtual keyboard representing Spectrum's one. Controls are the same as in standard RockBox's, though you just 'press' one key instead of entering phrase.

Play/Pause tape

Toggles playing of tape (if it is loaded).

Save quick snapshot

Saves snapshot into /.rockbox/zxboxq.z80.

Load quick snapshot

Loads snapshot from /.rockbox/zxboxq.z80.

Save Snapshot

Saves snapshot. You should enter full path and name like: /games/zx/snapshots/chuckie.sna. Snapshot format will be chosen considering extension you specified, though z80 is the default if you won't.

Toggle 'fast' mode

Toggles fastest possible emulation speed ( no sound, max frameskip,...). Usefull when loading tapes with some specific loaders.

Options

Enter options menu.

Quit

Quit emulator.

Options

Map keys to Kempston

This controls whether target buttons should be mapped to simulate Kempston joystick or defined Spectrum's keyboard keys.

Display speed

When on ZXBox displays actuall speed of emulation in percent.

Invert Colors

Do you want inverted color palette? (can be usefull on grayscale targets)

Frameskip

How much frames to skip before display one. With frameskip = 0 ZXBox tries to display 50 frames per second. So if your player's LCD speed is less than 50 fps with frameskip 0 you can't get full speed of emulation. For example iPod Video's LCD framerate is about 36.5 fps, so with frameskip 0 you'll get 74% speed, because zxbox want's to display 50 frames per second but just waits for lcd to display frame. You can see LCD framerates at LcdFrameRate page.

Sound

Turn sound on or off.

Volume

Controls volume of sound output.

Predefined keymap

Select one of the predefined keymaps for button.

For example 2w90z means:

• map Up to 2
• map Down to w
• map Left to 9
• map Right to 0
• map Jump/Fire to z

This, particular keymap is used in game Chuckie Egg

Custom keymap

This menu allows you to map buttons to whatever possible supported by vkeyboard Spectrum buttons you want.

Screenshots

This are screenshots of Rainbow Islands on various targets rockbox runs on:

• H100/H120/Ipod 4g/3g ( 4bpp output driver )

• H100/H120/Ipod 4g/3g ( Grayscale lib output driver )

• iPod mini ( 4bpp output driver )

• iPod mini ( Grayscale lib output driver )

• IAudio X5 / IRiver H10 (20GB)

• iPod Nano

• IRiver H340

• iPod Color/Photo

• iPod Video

Hacking graphics

Screens of some targets can be too small for some games so they can became unplayable. This is because screen scaling procedure to be as fast as possible just skips some lines and columns so that picture would fit the screen. Using some utilities like Spectrum Graphics Editor you can hack graphics so games would fit theese screens better.

For example, here is a screenshot of Chuckie Egg running on iPod mini:

Notice that some floor tiles are missing here.

And here is a screenshot with hacked floor tile:

Here you can see all floor levels fine.

You can find links to some usefull utilities at World Of Spectrum site.

Notes

• As ZXBox is 48k emulator loading of only 48k z80 snapshots is possible.
• Though ZXBox can be built for any of current supported target (with bitmap LCD) it is disabled for Archos targets being unusable on them due to very low speed on this devices.

TODO

• Proper keys handling implementation
• Nice and full virtual keyboard
• Proper sound implementation
• Rendering directly into framebuffer (now image is rendered into separate buffer and then rescaled into device framebuffer)
• Probably 128k support

back to PluginIndex

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CategoryPlugin: ZX Spectrum 48k emulator [H100, H300, H10, iPod 1G2G, iPod 4G, iPod Color, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod Video, iAudio M5, iAudio X5, Gigabeat, Sansa e200, Sansa c200, MR-100]