Emulators: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:56, 14 November 2025

WARNING:

The current Next emulators are work-in-progress, missing several features of real HW Next, and emulating other features in less than cycle-accurate way (which become a "norm" for classic ZX Spectrum after two decades of emulators development). The differences in results between real Next and CSpect or ZEsarUX are to be expected - as a developer test your SW also with real HW to find any problems early. It may also help to read the known-bugs pages to have some rough idea what works and how accurately. There're also multiple test-suites and free games and demos which you can try to go through and compare the emulator output with real machine, to get familiar with the differences and adjust your workflow and expectations.

Also make sure to explore the command line options and configuration of each emulator, as there are multiple ways how to run them with different fidelity of emulation. When in doubt, you are welcome to join the official ZX Spectrum Next discord chat and ask for help at #emulator-help channel.

Currently the most UI and performance friendly emulator seems to be #CSpect, the most accurate emulator is MAME.

Name	Author	Known bugs	Description	OS	Source	Maintained
CSpect	Mike Dailly	List	Emulates many features of the Next and includes a fully featured debugger, complete with 24bit breakpoints and an assembler	Windows (mac/linux with mono - mostly works)	No	Yes, no support
MAME	holub (Next), many contributors (MAME)	List‎	Mature multi-system emulator with relatively recent Next support. See installation notes.	Any	Yes	Yes
ZENext	César Hernández Bañó, Garry Lancaster		ZX Next-only fork of ZEsarUX emulating most of the core 3.1.10 features to make it run NextZXOS 2.07 (and possibly 2.08/2.09) (missing some features like CTC timers).	Any	Yes	Occasionally
ZEsarUX	César Hernández Bañó	List	A full feature emulator including a debugger - sometimes updated to support Next (TBBlue)	Any	Yes	Yes
ZESERUse	César Hernández Bañó, Peter Helcmanovsky	List	Fork of older ZEsarUX 8.2 with improved emulation accuracy of (rather old) core 3.1.5	Any	Yes	Rarely
Zeus	Simon Brattel		A PC cross-assembler which includes an IDE and Spectrum 48/128/+2/+3 emulator. Includes support for Next MMU banking, sprites and UART only, with remote debugging on Next hardware.	Windows	No	No

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 !Name||Author||Known bugs||Description||OS||Source||Maintained
 |-
-|CSpect||[https://lemmings.info/about/ Mike Dailly]||[[CSpect:known bugs|List]]||Emulates many features of the Next and includes a fully featured debugger, complete with 24bit breakpoints and an assembler||Windows ([https://lemmings.info/installing-cspect-on-a-mac/ mac]/[[Development_Tools:Linux_setup##CSpect_emulator|linux]] with mono - mostly works)||No||[https://www.patreon.com/posts/change-of-143208075 Yes, privately]
+|[https://mdf200.itch.io/cspect CSpect]||[https://lemmings.info/about/ Mike Dailly]||[[CSpect:known bugs|List]]||Emulates many features of the Next and includes a fully featured debugger, complete with 24bit breakpoints and an assembler||Windows ([https://lemmings.info/installing-cspect-on-a-mac/ mac]/[[Development_Tools:Linux_setup##CSpect_emulator|linux]] with mono - mostly works)||No||[https://www.patreon.com/posts/crash-and-cspect-143597332 Yes, no support]
 |-
 |[https://www.mamedev.org/ MAME]||[https://github.com/holub holub] (Next), many contributors (MAME)||[[MAME:known bugs|List]]‎||Mature multi-system emulator with relatively recent Next support. See [[MAME:Installing|installation notes]].||Any||[https://github.com/mamedev/mame Yes]||Yes