PlayZX

Baltazar Studios, LLC

In-app purchases

About this app

PLEASE READ THIS TEXT IN FULL BEFORE INSTALLING:

Select from thousands of Sinclair ZX Spectrum games and play them through the headphone jack to load them onto your Speccy. You can also select your local (on the device) TAP or TZX files, convert them to sound files and play them. This way you can load games for not only the ZX Spectrum micro but also any other retro computer that have compatible audio jacks.

IMPORTANT:
1. This is not an emulator, *it* will not play those games! You need an actual ZX Spectrum.

2. If you cannot browse and select your own files, it is likely caused by new Android permissions that Google changed with their newer development kits.
Please try this: Go to "System" -> "Apps & Notifications" -> Select "PlayZX" app -> scroll down to "Permissions" and allow "Storage" permission.

3. Make sure that your Android device is *not* connected to USB (for example, to charge it), while using this app. (Electrically, its ground needs to be floating with respect to the ZX Spectrum power supply)

4. Put your Android device in "Do Not Disturb" mode (*not* the Airplane mode as it needs internet access). This will prevent random notifications to disturb the signal output.

5. Use a good quality, preferably short, audio cable. For best results, use a stereo cable and turn the option to invert one stereo channel. Play with the volume: you may get different results on your phone vs. on your tablet, for example.

Ratings and reviews

The app works really well. I have modified my ZX +2A to load games on the (then) output-only connector, and now it's perfect. It loads games from PlayZX consistently. However if the author would accept some suggestions, they would be: - To be able to configure the user interface to increase the font size, on small screens is hard to select the exact game you want - And on bigger screens (10.8 inch tablet), the fonts are also too small, there is a lot of screen estate that gets wasted - There is no way to rewind the virtual tape! This is infuriating. For example, you try to load R-Type. It's a 10 minute audio virtual tape. The initial load is about 3.5 minutes. Then there is an intro on the computer, and you have to be quick to pause the PlayZX player, or else it'll start playing the 1st stage segment. If you miss that, or forget to press pause, you're dead. You won't be able to rewind, say, 5 seconds to try and load the header again. - Also it would be VERY useful to prevent the screen saver/lock screen (as an option), because when the phone/tablet screen goes blank, PlayZX stops playing the tape. So preventing the screen saver/screen lock to happen or keep playing in background it would be perfect. All in all, it works GREAT. Thanks!

I love this Spectrum app. Works perfectly for loading games on my real Spectrum+ using my mobile phone. Love the options to convert output to a square wave and invert one channel (try it). If I could add a couple if suggestions, it would be awesome to filter by: - Software House - Year Published - Other Users Rating's or Magazine Ratings (Crash etc). This may be harder to do, so just a thought. Fantastic app, essential for any Spectrum owner.

Interesting app. It works fine with online archives. However it is not clear where they are downloaded on local storage. The idea of reverse phase stereo is great to boost audio amplitude to 200% and works absolutely fine. Finally I managed to browse my internal memory by changing permissions to play my personal .tzx files However still no way to access SD card contents. But unfortunately It fails to play any of OTLA .tzx files. Works only with standard speed ZX spectrum files.

What's new

Maintenance release to update the Android API level requirement.