Emulators

An emulator is a program which reproduces the behaviour of one computing platform while running on another.

There are a wide variety of emulators for Sinclair machines.

List of emulators

A more complete list can be found at WoS; many of the links here point to the WoS archive.

Multiplatform

Fuse (Free Unix Spectrum Emulator) by Philip Kendall.

• Despite the name, also runs on non-Unix systems including Windows and Mac OS X.
• Fuse homepage.
• Fuse for Windows last version
• Fuse for macOS homepage, last version
• Fuse source code repository, libspectrum source code repository, fuse-utils source code repository; both Fuse and fuse-utils require libspectrum, but fuse-utils is optional. Your vendor/distribution may have a packaged version; the Fuse home page has links to some unofficial packages.
• Wikipedia article.

JSpeccy by José Luis Sánchez. Written in Java.

• JSpeccy Homepage
• Last version
• Source code repository

Spiffy by Edward Cree.

• Spiffy repository
• Available as source, and binaries for Linux and Windows, and can be compiled for Mac OS X.
  • Windows binaries are built by Guesser.

Windows

SpecEmu by Mark Woodmass. Freeware.

• Runs on anything from 95 onwards.
• No longer under active development.
• Latest version

Zero by Arjun Nair. Freeware.

• Requires Windows XP and above.
• Homepage

ZX Spin by Paul Dunn. Freeware.

• Runs on anything from 95 onwards.
• No longer under active development.
• Last stable version
• Experimental version with ULAplus support

BASin by Paul Dunn. Not strictly an emulator, but a Spectrum BASIC Development environment.

• No longer under active development.
• Last stable version
• Experimental version with ULAplus support

Spectaculator by Jonathan Needle. Shareware.

• Runs on XP and above (older versions for 9x onwards exist).
• Spectaculator home page

Spud by Richard Chandler. Freeware

• Spud for Windows

RealSpectrum by Ramsoft.

• Originally DOS-based, runs on XP and older.
• No longer officially available.