Blimey! The newest Amiga Spectrum emulator is developed in Belarus! (I'd originally put Russia, but Dmitriy kindly corrected me on that point) To be honest, it's hardly surprising that a Spectrum emulator has come from that area. From all accounts, the Speccy was extremely popular over there (and in Russia), with variety of clones and improved-spec models than we in Blighty ever so. I think. Anyway, onto the review.

ZX-Live is still a work in progress. The author has accomplished a great deal, even though the current version (as of December, 2003) is at v0.19. So, what's the story with this emulator? Well, firstly, ZX-Live manages to emulate 48K and 128K Spectrums. Nothing particularly special there, except that the 128K emulation in ZX-Live does not require a MMU chip.

This is quite a difference, as the other 128K Spectrum emulator I have reviewed (ASp) does require a MMU. Now I'm not saying this is a 'good' or 'bad' thing, just a different way of creating an emulator. What it does do, is open up 128K emulation for more Amiga owners.

The minimum spec for ZX-Live is an A1200 with some 32bit Fast RAM. Now, as any fule would kno, (sic), the beefier the Amiga the better. As such, the author recommends an '060. It's to be expected, really. Now if you imagine Spectrum performance on a sliding scale, with pretty rubbish being at the '020 minimum and silky smooth at the '060 I'm currently getting a reasonably good performance with my '040.

However, reasonably good doesn't mean perfect. An example is Chase HQ. Whilst ASp manages to emulate that 128K driving game with most of speed of the Spectrum original, ZX-Live doesn't. When playing the game, it scrolls quite smoothly but you can tell it's not operating at 100 percent Spectrum speed. Additionally, ASp is able to emulate the digitised speech and sound effects. Chase HQ is eerily quiet with ZX-Live. I must stress that I do not know if this is a result of my Amiga hardware or the emulator iself.

This lack of sound does not appear to happen on the 48K games I have tried. This means that, from a practical point of view, whilst ZX-Live is more than capable of loading and playing 128K games, you don't get the 'whole experience', so to speak. Whist having no sound is not so much a problem with the IV emulator on the Psion Series 7, I'd expect it on a desktop machine. All said, ZX-Live is still a work-in-progress, so perhaps I shouldn't harp on about it so much.

Additionally, when playing 48K games which have 'good' sound - for example Earth Shaker, ZX-Live handles the intro music at almost 100 percent full speed (which is about the same as ASp) and the game plays fine. 48K games which just use the traditional naff 'bleep' sound chip, for example Edd the Duck, run at full Spectrum 48K speed. Just remember, the author recommends a processor faster than what my Amiga has, so you should be able to gauge how good the emulator will perform on your machine.

Functionality-wise, ZX-Live is a bit lacking. The author readily admits that a GUI is on his 'to - do' list. This means that for the moment, you need to use function keys to load and save games, reset the Spectrum and quit the program. This is hardly a detriment to the program, but a GUI would help with the other 'nice to haves'.

For example, the location where the emulated games are stored. ZX-Live expects them in a specific location. None of the other Amiga emulators I've reviewed demand this. Additionally, a GUI would be useful when choosing screenmodes. Currently, you don't get a choice. Lastly, a necessary nice to have is the ability to choose differing control methods. The emulator can only handle Kempston joystick and keyboard controls. Amiga owners know the 'problem' they suffer with keyboards, so having an ASp-like choice of controller (including CD32 as a keyboard) would be great.

As an unfinished (but definately useable) emulator, ZX-Live is good. It's also healthy to have a competitor in the 128K Spectrum stakes. However, ZX-Live will need to improve quite a bit before I use it more than ASp.