Hey, I was playing around with my EP128 during the Christmas holiday and I had a rather silly idea, which appeared to be interesting, at the end...
Have a look at this:
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"Yeah, big deal", I hear you say...
But wait!!! This is NOT the ZX81emu emulator by geco running MAZOGS on the Enterprise...
...it's the excellent SpEmu by geco, running the also excellent ZX81 emulator for the Spectrum by dr.beep (Johan Koelman), which runs MAZOGS!!!
I'm not sure if someone else had tried this so far, at least I didn't find it posted somewhere! It was big fun doing this, just because it could be done!!!
Reporting my impressions out of this test:Well, the EP128 already runs as a Spectrum at a little lower speed, let's say 85-90%. The ZX81 emu by dr.beep also runs a little slower on a real Spectrum, so on the EP128 I assume that we have here a speed of about 65-70% of a real Zeddy. But this is quite reasonable and usable, we can play games at this speed, it's not dead-slow...
Two major caveats:a) Only the first (1.0) version of dr.beep's Zeddy emu will load Zeddy games converted to TAP... The recent, improved 2.0 version loads fine on the EP128, but it always freezes on the header section (bytes:filename), when trying to load Zeddy games on the EP128. This doesn't happen on real Spectrum or the 2.0 Zeddy emu running under a Windoze Speccy emu, like Spectaculator (the one I'm using on my laptop...)
b) On a real Spectrum or on a Windoze Spectrum emulator, both versions of dr.beep's Zeddy emu have a rather high compatibility rate, let's say that almost 7-8 out of 10 "normal" lo-res games will run fine. On the EP128 with the trick I tried, I was able to successfully play, let's say 3-4 out of 10 Zeddy proggies... Many of them are loading fine but they e.g. freeze/crash on the starting screen. Most recent games like the ones from Bob Smith will not run properly.
But hey,
3D Monster Maze, La Pulga, Mazogs, Gauntlet, which are some of my all time favorites, run just fine, of course slower, as I mentioned above!!
Cool!! And it's software-only!!!!