Back in the 1980s, the battle lines were drawn between the various home computers: Commodore 64 vs ZX Spectrum vs Amstrad. Those were the days. The C64 has had an official emulator available for iPhone for months, but it’s now facing competition once more from the Speccy, in the form of the ZX Nostalgia app.
It’s a fully functioning emulator, bundled with 14 games. They include Horace Goes Skiing, Manic Miner, Fantastic Voyage and the legendary Chuckie Egg – a game that I liked so much back then, I don’t dare play now in case it turns out to have been rubbish all along.
The app uses a virtual joystick and fire buttons to control the games, offers full sound, and claims to run the games at 100% of their speed – many emulators disappoint on the latter score.
However, ZX Nostalgia has some way to go to match the rival Commodore 64 app, which has games including Wizball, KikStart, Paradroid and Microprose Soccer in its armoury. That said, the Spectrum app only costs £0.59 with all the games bundled in for free, so for ZX nostalgics, it’s a pretty good deal.
Your move, Amstrad. Perhaps a brave developer should give Sir Alan Sugar a call…
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