OK, I give up. There really is an app for everything. Speccy Tape an iOS app, that loads Spectrum tapes. Not onto an iOS emulator, or anything. Onto an actual, physical 8-bit ZX Spectrum.
Listen up, youngsters, and let me tell you of a time. It was a different time. Day-Glo leg warmers were “trendy”, Michael Jackson wasn’t entirely creepy and I had hair. More importantly, if you wanted to load up Jet Set Willy (not what it sounds like), you did so via audio tape, with the screechy sounds being the actual game code. This made for interesting times when you thought you were putting on Duran Duran to impress a young lady or gentleman, and instead ruptured one of their eardrums. But I digress.
Speccy Tape throws back to that age. It’s an iOS app that… loads tapes onto a ZX Spectrum. Not a virtual ZX Spectrum; you’ll need an actual ZX Spectrum — and most likely an amplifier of some sort — to get it to work. A harder task in Australia than elsewhere, given the ZX Spectrum was never as big as the Commodore 64 — or even the Amstrad 464 — but the concept is sound, and I can’t see why it couldn’t work for those systems, at least in application theory.
I also like the idea (although I suspect I’d lose patience with tape loading these days) as it allows you to use the original hardware, although if you don’t happen to have a ZX Spectrum (and I don’t, so I can’t expect you to), I can heartily recommend the ZX Spectrum: Elite Collection app. Which reminds, me, I’ve still got to finish that run-through of Wanted! Monty Mole.
It seems entirely fitting that I spotted this via Julian Rignall’s Twitter feed.
Sources: iTunes, Twitter
Image: quenerapu