Before Gunter Woigk wrote Mac Spectacle, he wrote an earlier emulator called ZXSP. As the title of the emulator may suggest, this is the OSX-native version of that. One major point to noteeven in its' early stage (version 0.5.10 is the newest), it's much more stable than ZXSP Classic Edition is. Blimey.

ZXSP OSX currently supports .sna and .z80 file formats. Okay, that's one less format than Spectactle, but given how reliable that is [when using on an OS9.x machine], that's not a great loss. On Gunter's website, it doesn't say that the development for ZXSP - OSX has stopped, so there's more chance of seeing decent .tap and .tzx support than Spectactle will. However, the last version of ZXSP - OSX was released in February 2002 so I wouldn't hold your breath...

There's a lot of potential for ZXSP. For example, it lists fifteen (!) versions of the Spectrum and clones (see the picture), although not all of them currently work. As you can see in the screengrab, the first three machines are greyed out, making them unselectable. Additionally, the Sam Coupe version doesn't work. Perhaps this is because I haven't got the correct ROM. Or something.

Also, the menus refer to the five different types of joystick that Gunter intends (intended?) to implement in future releases. This shows some commitment to his project, although it would have been nice to have at least one of the controller options working.

Another sign of usefulness is the CPU speed menu. You can raise the roof (so to speak) and increase the Spectrums' speed to a whopping 800 percent. Apparently this is useful when you're loading a .tzx file. However, as ZXSP doesn't support that file format, I'm not sure what the purpose of having a stupidly-fast Spectrum is.

This review must sound quite negative (and somewhat shorter than the others). However, the tasks which ZXSP can do, it does well. It is a bit disheartening to see all the possibilities of what the program could be like, had it been updated. As for review length, most of what was said in the Mac Spectacle review applies here. This is because as they share the same author, the two programs are similar but not identical.

To summarise: ZXSP is a good, basic Spectrum emulator. It works well in OSX. However, it has been completely eclipsed by Fuse. It would be great to see what ZXSP can do, but that's entirely up to its' author....