About

Created by Remy Sharp as a child of the late 70s the ZX Spectrum are his fondest memories of computing as a kid. So it only made sense that he turn his browser-based skills to made things work on the Spectrum.

Inspired by the return of Spectrum via the ZX Next, Remy learnt how loading screens worked, how the binary data in screens is arranged and presented his work in a mad demo on stage in 2018.

Open Source

The code is a little hacky (written over a few days), but has some semblance of organisation. It can be found in github and is available under the MIT license:

https://github.com/remy/zx-tools

Seen an issue or want to make these tools better? Raise an issue

Text 2 BASIC

Features:

• Drag and drop support
• Can upload and parse 3DOS+ .bin files and plain .txt
• Export as:
  • .TAP
  • .bin 3DOS+ format - compatible with ZX Spectrum Next
  • .wav with correct headers and pilot for tape loading
• Import from gists, github and gitlab via query string, such as:
  ?id=3cbe71821d3eae96273d0cef0426fda0 or
  ?url=https://gitlab.com/thesmog358/tbblue/-/blob/master/games/Next/NextBASIC%20Invaders/basicInvaders.bas
  
• Parses 10print"ok" and correctly expands
• Unique line numbers, so repeating a line number will replace previous line
• Session remembers last code

Sprites

Editor based on the .spredit tool on the ZX Spectrum Next.

Features:

• Exports to .spr ZX Spectrum Next compatible format
• Supports both 16x16 and 8x8 tilemaps
• Drag and drop import
• Can import spectrum binary font files and map to sprites
• Palette editor with priority support
• Imports PNG file format for easy sprite creation
• Import PNG to sprite sheet support dimensions at multiples of 16x16 blocks - i.e. 32x48 or 16x256 etc
• See usage panel for full list of keyboard and mouse shortcuts

Tools

The general tools allow you inspect the contents of TZX and TAP files, and extract and inspect sections, with support for font, SCREEN$ and some BASIC previewing.

The tools can also take any JPG image (in any resolution) and convert it to a ZX Spectrum compatible 15 colour image that be rendered into Spectrum memory.

There is also support for TTF font importing which approximates font rendering for the spectrum.