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A ZX Spectrum that behaves like a modern console.
Save at any moment, put the
picture through the CRT you remember, pick up a controller and play.
Android 11 and later. The emulation is Fuse, unmodified; the front end is native.
Most of the code was written by Claude, directed and reviewed by a professional software developer.
Building, testing and releases: docs/DEVELOPING.md. How Fuse is wired in: docs/INTERNALS.md.
Stop wherever you like. States are a grid of cards, each showing the screen it holds, renamed and deleted on the card itself. Quick save and quick load sit on the shoulder buttons — Select + R1 and Select + L1 — and are named after whatever is running, so every game keeps its own pair. Written as SZX, Z80 or SNA.
- Scanlines, or a CRT with curvature, shadow mask and glow, or both together
- The signal: RGB, composite or RF, with colour bleed and noise
- A black-and-white television
- Every effect's strength and the sharpness are yours to set
Scaling runs on the GPU — fitted to the screen, or at a whole number of device pixels per emulated pixel. Border in full, slimmed to a quarter, or cropped away. Fullscreen leaves nothing but the picture and your thumbs.
On a dual-screen handheld — an AYN Thor and its like — the controls, the menu and the indicators move to the second panel entirely, leaving the first showing nothing but the machine. The setting cannot be switched on with no panel to move to, and unplugging one brings everything back.
With the library on, the panel shows whichever game is selected — its artwork, the facts and the description — and the list gets the whole first screen. Once a game is running a corner switch flips the panel between the controls and that same page.
Android decides which display an input method appears on, so the Android keyboard skin usually opens over the machine. It still types into the Spectrum.
Plug one in and it works — no mapping screen. Stick, hat and D-pad steer, A is fire, B, X and Y are the key buttons, Start is Enter, and the on-screen pad steps aside.
Hotkeys are RetroArch style: one button is the hotkey, and every action is that button and another, so nothing is taken from the game. The hotkey is Select by default and can be any button, or None, in which case bindings fire on their own. Twenty-two actions to bind; nine out of the box:
| Action | Button |
|---|---|
| Pause or resume | Select + B |
| Quit the app | Select + Start |
| Quick save | Select + R1 |
| Quick load | Select + L1 |
| Fast forward | Select + R2, while held |
| Fullscreen | Select + X |
| Show or hide the keyboard | Select + Y |
| Next key profile | Select + R3 |
| Next joystick type | Select + L3 |
Fast forward runs at 500% and stays silent. Rebind in ☰ Controls… › Controller hotkeys…: tap a row, press the button.
The joystick comes out as any of the Spectrum's seven interfaces — Kempston, Cursor, Sinclair 1 and 2, Timex 1 and 2, Fuller — or as keys. Key profiles cover QAOPM, QAOP and Space, the cursor keys, both Sinclair sets and WASD, and you can copy any of them, edit the eight keys, and delete what you no longer want.
Interface, profile, keyboard and mouse all change from the bar across the top of the window, mid-game.
The on-screen joystick is a thumb pad, fire and three key buttons in an arc, put where the picture leaves room and laid over it, translucent, when it does not.
Four keyboards, drawn rather than photographed, so they stay sharp at any size: the rubber 48K and the 128K plate, each also slim with the BASIC left off. Every key carries its keyword, symbol-shift character, colour and extended-mode token, in the colours the machine printed them in. Two fingers give a shifted key; hold a shift for 400ms and it latches until tapped again. Your own input method is there too as a fifth choice.
Whenever no keyboard is on screen — you put it away, or you are in fullscreen — a button by the pad raises a see-through one over the picture instead, in whichever skin you chose, and the joystick stays put, so a game wanting a key and a stick at once can have both.
Kempston mouse — a mode. While on, a drag moves the pointer, and fire and the first key button are its buttons. Sensitivity is a setting.
Cheats for 3,682 games are built in, matched by the file's own fingerprint — or
find a game by name yourself, when it loaded under a different one. Ones that
take a number ask for it. Pokes of your own can be fired once or
kept on a list; decimal, or hex after 0x, $ or #. A scrape can add more:
the built-in database answers first, because it matches on the file itself, and
anything scraped tops it up rather than replacing it. Nothing for your game? A
link opens a search on The Tipshop, which is where the database came from.
Screenshots as PNG, and recording to GIF or MP4. All three go to
Pictures/Zedex and show up in your gallery, named after whatever is running.
| Family | Machines |
|---|---|
| Sinclair | 16K · 48K · 48K NTSC · 128K · +2 · +2A · +3 · +3e |
| Timex | TC2048 · TC2068 · TS2068 |
| Clones | Pentagon 128K · 512K · 1024K · Scorpion ZS 256 |
| Other | Spectrum SE |
- Speed 25%–500%, reset, NMI, Issue 2 keyboard
- Turbo — a 7 MHz processor at 50 Hz — on the Pentagons and the Scorpion
- AY-3-8912 in ACB or ABC stereo, on the 128K family
- TurboSound — two AY chips, six channels — on the Pentagons and the Scorpion
- Beta 128 and TR-DOS, drives A:–D:, on the Pentagons and the Scorpion
- The +3 floppy, drives A: and B:
- DivMMC and a memory card, on any machine
- Timex SCLD video and its hi-res modes
- A tape deck that reads and writes
- Kempston mouse
Snapshots, tapes, disks, cartridges, microdrive images and RZX recordings. The
file identifies itself, and the machine switches when the media needs one — a
.dsk brings up a +3, a .trd a Beta-equipped machine.
- Opens files handed over by other apps
- Fast tape loading: off, safe (ROM loaders), or turbo (custom loaders too)
- Writes tapes and disks out, or back over the file they came from
- Recent files: the last ten
- A demo tape in your tapes folder — the first run says where
- The machine ROMs are put there for you, and kept in the app's own storage instead if that folder ever cannot hold them — nothing to do either way
First start asks for two folders. The data folder can be changed later in Settings › App, the content folder in Settings › Library.
Files the app writes there are yours to open, copy and delete. Files you copy
in are a different matter: Android hands an app only what it wrote itself, so
a tape dropped into tapes from a computer is invisible to the app and has to
be opened through Open file… instead — which remembers it afterwards. The
build from Releases here can additionally be granted All files access, and then
any folder will do, /storage/emulated/0/Zedex included; the Play build cannot,
because Play does not allow that permission to an app that works without it.
| Data folder | roms, states, tapes, disks, cards. /storage/emulated/0/Documents/Zedex by default — a folder any file manager can open, and one the app needs no permission at all to use. Screenshots and recordings are not in it: they go to Pictures/Zedex, which is what puts them in your gallery |
| Content folder | where Open file… starts, on the first open after each launch |
A DivMMC with esxDOS on it. Two things are yours to bring:
- Firmware.
ESXMMC.BIN, the 8K DivMMC build, from esxdos.org. Settings › Machine › DivMMC firmware. - A card image. ☰ Media… › Insert card…. An
.hdf, or a raw image such as a MiSTer.vhd, which gets an HDF header written for it. It needs esxDOS's ownBINandSYSfolders on it.
Switch on DivMMC interface in the same place; the machine resets. Then .ls
lists the card, . commands are esxDOS's, and ☰ Machine… › NMI opens its file
browser. Changes are written back once a second and whenever the app is paused.
The app can open on your games instead of the machine — Settings › Library › Start in the library, which needs a content folder to browse. ☰ goes between the two either way.
- The content folder as a list or a grid; zip archives open like folders
- Favourites and Recent beside Browse; search, sort by name, size, release date, format or rating
- Filter by format, genre, rating, developer or publisher — narrows the whole collection, not just the folder you're browsing; from the toolbar's Options button or the pad's Select
- A controller drives all of it: the stick moves, A plays, B goes up, Y favourites, L1/R1 change tab, L2/R2 page, X searches and Select opens View, Sort and Filter
Names, descriptions, artwork and manuals come from an ES-DE scrape if you have one — or scrape them yourself, one game from its menu or a whole folder at a time, choosing which pictures you want. Settings › Library picks where from and what to fetch.
| ZXInfo | The database behind SpectrumComputing. No account, nothing to set up. Matches on the file's own hash first, which is exact, and on the name only if that misses |
| ScreenScraper | Covers, screenshots, video and manuals for far more than the Spectrum. Everyone using the app shares one daily allowance, and every picture spends a piece of it — Settings › Library › ScreenScraper username is optional and buys a much larger one of your own |
| zxart | The demoscene and games archive. No account, nothing to set up. Can confirm a renamed or re-zipped file exactly, from a hash carried on the archive side, and states which machine and joystick a game needs |
All three, in whichever order you pick, each filling in what the others left out — and where they offer different pictures for the same game, you choose. You can also type the details in yourself; a scrape only ever fills in what you left blank and never replaces what you typed.
A scrape brings more than pictures. ZXInfo carries the manual, extra pokes for the cheats page, and the game's own music — where somebody has ripped the AY tunes out of it, Music… plays them and puts the machine back exactly where it was afterwards, mid-level and mid-jump.
A page per game holds every picture there is for it — cover, loading screen, in-game shot, the cassette or disk itself, a map — plus the video and the manual. Manuals come as a PDF or as somebody's typed-up transcription, and the transcriptions open in the app, monospaced and never re-wrapped, because that is the only way the ASCII tables in them survive.
A fourth tab browses ZXInfo's ~40,000 entries, or zxart.ee's — a switch beside the format filter picks which — and imports what you choose into your own folder. Where an archive can order a list, a Sort row says so and lets you change it; where it cannot, the row is not there.
- ZXInfo: search, A–Z, 0–9, by category, newest first, Surprise me, or games like the one you are looking at
- zxart: search, its own category tree, everything, and its music and graphics — no A–Z there, because the archive cannot filter by first letter, so it sorts alphabetically instead
- An import lands in
Downloaded/Games,Applications,Demosceneand so on, so what the app fetched stays separate from what you put there - It arrives with its cover and description already on, because the catalogue's own entry is handed to the scraper rather than the file being looked up again by name
- A recording plays itself back when it arrives
- Entries the archive cannot distribute stay on the list, greyed, with the reason — a game that was announced and cancelled is worth knowing about
- zxart also carries its own music and rendered artwork as two more shelves, opened with whatever the phone plays audio and pictures with
Checked on a device. A game that arrives as several files has not been tried there, and the recordings ZXInfo hosts elsewhere do not appear to be offered through it at all.
Where the database knows what a game wants, opening it offers to set the machine and the joystick to match — once, with a box to remember the answer for that game. Skip leaves everything alone.
Where the game was scraped from ScreenScraper and came with a pad layout, the same dialog can offer its keys instead of a joystick, as a profile named after the game. That is a different fact from a different service: which keys a pad sends, rather than which interface the game listens to.
The quick bar — a strip across the top of the window, either way up. Tap the picture to bring it back; it fades after three seconds.
| Files | open one, and the last ten |
| States | save, load, and the quick pair named after what is running |
| Machine | pause, change machine, reset, NMI |
| Capture | screenshot, GIF, MP4, and the folder they go to |
| On screen | the keyboard and the joystick, and the four settings worth changing mid-game: joystick interface, key profile, keyboard, mouse |
| Display | scanlines, CRT, video output, border, lamps |
| Fast forward | hold for 500%, silent |
| Fullscreen |
☰ has Library, Open file…, Open recent…, Machine…, States…, Pokes…, Music…, Media…, Capture…, Controls…, Settings…, About Zedex and Quit. Library…, Open recent… and Music… appear when there is something for them to show. Back never exits: it leaves fullscreen, or goes up a menu page, or opens ☰. Quit warns about unsaved disks first.
Settings has seven tabs — Machine, Tape, Display, Controls, Sound, Library, App. The first five are the Spectrum; the last two are Zedex: the library and its folder, then language, folders, formats, updates. Everything that persists is there, exactly once; ☰ and the bar are shortcuts to the same settings.
Activity lamps — tape, disk, memory card, AY, keyboard, joystick, mouse. Blue reads, amber writes; the AY is three bars, one per channel. A lit joystick lamp with a dead stick means the game wants a different interface.
Fullscreen gives the picture their strip back, and keeps one of them: the disk, where the strip itself would be — under the picture upright, beside it sideways — for as long as a drive is turning and not a moment longer. It is the lamp that answers "is it safe to close this yet". Turning the indicators off in Settings › Display turns that off too.
If you use ES-DE as your frontend, Settings › App › Add to ES-DE writes Zedex into its list of Spectrum emulators — its own entries are kept, and the row only appears when ES-DE is installed. Games then launch straight from ES-DE into Zedex.
Unless Zedex already has All files access it will ask to be shown ES-DE's folder, once; nothing outside that folder is touched.
Settings › Library › Link to ES-DE goes the other way: what ES-DE has scraped — names, descriptions, artwork, videos and manuals — becomes Zedex's own library. Only the words are copied; the pictures stay where ES-DE keeps them. Press it again to take in what has changed since.
English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Russian and Ukrainian. It follows the phone's language, and Settings › App › App language overrides it for Zedex alone.
No advertising, no analytics library, no accounts, and nothing stored about you anywhere. The whole app carries two libraries, one for the settings screen and one for the library's own list. Internet access is used for four things and all are yours to ask for: fetching a ROM set, asking GitHub whether there is a newer release than the one you are running, looking a game up when you scrape it, and browsing the catalogue when you open that tab. Scraping and the catalogue send nothing but what you asked about and the app's own name and version.
That second one is counted, and it is the only measure of use this project has: the check fetches the small checksum file published beside your version's download, and GitHub counts downloads, so the totals say roughly how often the app is started and which versions are still in use. A total, and nobody in it who can be picked out. Settings › App › Check for updates stops it. The full account is in docs/PRIVACY.md.
About Zedex › Report a problem writes down the version, the device, the Android version, where your files are and the settings that change what the app does — and the crash, if it stopped last time. You see all of it, can edit any of it, and it goes by your own mail app. Nothing is collected in the background and nothing is sent unless you send it.
The Play build is the same emulator — same core, same machines, same settings — but Play does not allow it two permissions, and two things go with them.
| Updating itself | Play updates its own apps, so that build contains neither the code nor the REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES permission to install an APK, and Settings › App › Check for updates is not there |
| Any folder as the data folder | without All files access the data folder can only be somewhere Android gives an app for free: Documents/Zedex, the app's own storage, or Android/data/… on internal storage or an SD card. Not /storage/emulated/0/Zedex, and there is no Choose folder… |
Everything else is the same, Add to ES-DE included — it asks to be shown
ES-DE's folder once instead of wanting access to everything. Screenshots and
recordings still reach your gallery; Pictures/Zedex needs no permission
either.
The build from Releases does both. Either build can be granted nothing at all and still work; the difference is only what it may ask for.
The build from Releases here offers to update itself: one question to GitHub when
the app starts, and if there is a newer release, a note saying so. Say yes and it
downloads that APK, checks it against the .sha256 published beside it, and
hands it to Android's installer — which will ask you to allow Zedex to install
apps, once. Settings › App › Check for updates turns the whole thing off. The
Play build has none of this, as above.
- Importing more than one thing at a time. A queue is a different feature with different manners
- Suggestions as you type in the catalogue. The archive asks to be asked gently, and a request per keystroke is the opposite of that
- Narrowing the catalogue to tapes or disks, which the archive supports and the tab has nowhere to put yet
- A debugger, which the core supports and nothing yet exposes
Zedex is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version. The full text is in LICENSE.
vendor/ keeps its own upstream copyright — see vendor/fuse-1.9.1/AUTHORS and
vendor/libspectrum-1.6.3/AUTHORS. Everything outside it is © 2026 Dmitrii
Leshchenko.
The name Zedex and the app icon are not covered by the GPL, which grants no trademark rights. Fork the code freely; ship it under your own name.
The ROMs are not under the GPL and are not ours. Most are Fuse's set, redistributed by permission of the copyright holders — Amstrad for the Sinclair machines, others for the rest. README.copyright.md is that permission, copied from Fuse whole. No games are included.
The demo's music is not ours. The tune the shipped demo tape plays is Time Up by shiru8bit, from OpenGameArt under CC-BY 3.0, used with attribution and otherwise unchanged.
The cheats are not ours. They come from The Tipshop, run by Gerard Sweeney. The machine-readable form is AllTipshopPokes, gathered by Lady Eklipse and distributed with ZX Pokemaster.
The catalogue is not ours either. Every name, description, screen, cover, manual and file the library scrapes or imports from ZXInfo comes out of ZXDB — an open database created by Einar Saukas, built from Martijn van der Heide's original World of Spectrum, Jim Grimwood's SPOT/SPEX/TTFn, Daren Pearcy's RZX Archive and Chris Bourne's ZXSR, all imported with their consent, and corrected and extended by many hands since. Zedex reaches it through the open API at ZXInfo, and the files it names are served by Spectrum Computing.
ZXDB asks only that anyone using it says so, which is what this paragraph is for; its formal model is the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0). It also records, per entry, whether the copyright holder allowed free distribution — where one has not, the entry stays on the list with that reason shown against it, and the archive does not serve the file.