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 | Author | Known bugs | Description | OS | Source | Maintained |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CSpect | Mike Dailly | CSpect:known bugs | 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) | N | Y, not currently public |
| MAME | holub (Next), many contributors (MAME) | MAME:known bugs | Mature multi-system emulator with relatively recent Next support MAME:Installing |
Any | Y (bleeding-edge Next) | Y |
| 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 2.09 (missing some features like CTC timers). | Any | Y | Occasionally | |
| ZEsarUX | César Hernández Bañó | ZEsarUX:known bugs | A full feature emulator including a debugger - sometimes updated to support Next (TBBlue) | Any | Y | Y |
| ZESERUse | César Hernández Bañó + Peter Helcmanovsky | ZESERUse:known bugs | ZX Next-only fork of ZEsarUX emulating most of the core 3.1.5 features, focusing on hardware rather than OS. 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). | Any | Y | Occasionally |
| Zeus | Design Design | 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 | N | N |