Emulators
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 features/accurate emulation of core3.1.5 (but far from perfect) has ZESERUse (fork of ZEsarUX).
| Name | Runs on | Source | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|---|
| CSpect - Mike Dailly Emulates many features of the Next and includes a fully featured debugger, complete with 24bit breakpoints and an assembler (pre-made SD card images here) ATTENTION: since V2.16.0 you need card image with NextZXOS 2.07 (core 3.1.10), otherwise you will see only purple stripes with NextZXOS2.06 (core 3.1.5) download known-bugs |
Windows (mac/linux mostlyworks through mono) |
N | Sprites Lores Layer Layer 2 3xAY audio Next Opcodes Specdrum/Covox DAC Wifi Module |
| ZEsarUX - César Hernández Bañó A full feature emulator including a debugger - sometimes updated to support Next (TBBlue) download source known-bugs |
Any | Y | Sprites Lores Layer Layer 2 3xAY audio Next Opcodes Specdrum/Covox DAC |
| ZESERUse - César Hernández Bañó + Peter Helcmanovsky Currently most complete core3.1.5 emulation based on ZEsarUX 8.2 version (for windows executable check official Next discord or build it yourself - make sure you are building the "tbblue_small_fixes2" branch). source known-bugs |
Any | Y | Sprites Lores Layer Layer 2 3xAY audio Next Opcodes Specdrum/Covox DAC |
| Zeus - Design Design A PC cross-assembler which includes a Z80 emulator, which can emulate the ZX Spectrum 48K/128K hardware. download |
Windows | N | Sprites (partial) Next Opcodes |