Handy apps: PlayZX
04/07/2019So you've managed to get yourself an old Speccy, but it's 2019 and you no longer have a cassette player kicking around - what do you do?
PlayZX (by Baltazar Studios, LLC) turns your Android phone or tablet into a replacement cassette player, allowing you to load games into your Spectrum in the way Sir Clive originally intended: using a standard audio cable, you plug your phone into the EAR socket on your Spectrum just as you would a cassette player!
It links directly into the World Of Spectrum archive so aslong as you have an internet connection, you can grab any game you like and PlayZX will download the tap/tzx and churn out those wonderful noises we all miss so dearly - games are seperated alphabetically to make browsing easier. Of course not everything you may wish to play is on World of Spectrum so the app also allows you play locally stored files aswell.
The player itself is easy enough to use, with just play, pause and stop buttons. It can be configured to output sound as mono, or if your device has a silly safety feature stopping you blasting out the volume then you can use the Invert one stereo channel option to squeeze a little more signal through the cable. It also has a Turbo (x2) speed option which may not work on all games, but is certainly worth a shot if you need your Jet Set Willy fix in a hurry.
Due to the massive amount of games on World of Spectrum PlayZX provides you with a search ability, you can also rate games which are added to a Favourites tab and sorted accordingly.
All in all it is a handy little app to have, however your milage may vary depending on how loud your device can knock out the signal.
Download PlayZX from Google Play.
