Zx Spectrum Emulator

Marvin – The Android Spectrum Emulator This Could be Good by This ...

I have written about emulators in the past and have had the priveledge of using some of the best and worst out there. While i think it is fair to say that all are developed and produced with the best intentions some do fall short of the mark. Whether that is because of development time or the project is not yet at a mature enough stage of development.

By far the best emulator out there has to be SNES9x emulator I would certainly recommend downloading as many emulators as you can and seeing which works best with your device – there is some trial and error but if you were to download SNES9x for example, even on very recent hardware, you won’t go far wrong.

Previously I have written an all encompassing article about console emulators but now I am looking at computer emulators and I want to try to dedicate a lot more column space to each emulator I am trying. This is because generally they are slightly trickier to configure and need more experimentation. (Or at least I thought). These are dedicated to the following platforms.

All of the above herald back to the 1980′s. The only exception here is that the Amiga is a 16bit emulator, the others 8bit. So I am going to start with Marvin the ZX Spectrum emulator. If you are stateside this is the Timex TS2068.

My first impressions of Marvin were quite impressive. First of all to see that old rubber keyed Speccie sitting there in front of me with its familiar multiple shortcuts on each and every key. Might sound a little strange these days but back when the Spectrum was popular barely anyone had any keyboard experience so these shortcuts saved a great deal of time.

Marvin is capable of emulating a 48k and 128k Spectrum the 128k model has a full qwerty keyboard instead of the legendary rubber keys.

Loading a game is a doddle. You can either load one from the World of Spectrum website or load a game direct from your SD Card.

Visually I couldn’t find anything too much to complain at. The software hung only once in about 15 hours of gaming so that was neither here nor there. When I ran the same game again it ran with no issue so the problem may or may not have been a problem with the testing device.

My favorite games on this machine were the Dizzy games and they ran flawlessly on Marvin. Quite sophisticated platform shooters like the Batman game ran very well and very smooth too. In fact everything i threw at it worked like a charm.

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