On a lunch break from trimming our garden hedges, I spotted a post by a friend of mine showing this rather funky little shmup on the ZX Spectrum. It’s called Chrono which was a budget game released by wallet friendly Mastertronic from 1987.
I had a Google around after reading the post as I wanted to know a little bit more about the game and that’s when I stumbled across the game being emulated fully playable directly inside a web browser.
As you can see from the red section on the left hand side, there’s plenty of emulator options to play around with including AY sound chip emulation, support for 128k games and a save/restore function. On the right hand side there’s a collection of other speccy games to try, including many of the popular titles from yesteryear. Some of the control keys (on those games that don’t have a re-definable option) can be a little puzzling to get started but the most part they support the good ol fashions Q,A, O & P configuration.
It was the top left ‘open’ button that intrigued me and as it turns out you can use this to import in your own ZX Spectrum games. Pretty much all the usual formats are included (no TZX though) so I headed over to the WOS to pick up a few files .
Sweet…got my favourite ZX clone of Phoenix running.
Hang on a minute, what does that link ‘more games’ do on the middle left hand side? Here you’ll find even more games to play ranging from vintage 1982 games right up to 201x……oh and typical, Pheenix is there too!
This 2011 homebrew release called Retroinvaders plays a lot like Gryus and is superb!
…..and finally, just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, the emulator is written in HTML5 so it’ll work on my iPad too….ok so it’s not perfect with virtual keys but its o.k for games which, for example, use only few keys. I did try it with my Bluetooth keyboard tethered but it wouldn’t work with that.
On the hunt for spies….or a spy on the hunt?
How the hell am I going to finish cutting the hedges now!
Here’s the link – http://torinak.com/qaop/games – have fun.
