Hello, welcome to The Spectrum Box!
This website (whose development began in late 2017) was conceived as a repository, designed with extreme immediacy and ease of use in mind.
No complicated / distracting graphics, no blog: everything is optimized to help you quickly and easily find and download the program you're looking for.
Screenshots are presented both in 1:1 size (256 x 192 pixels) and at 1.5x for better visibility on today's high resolution monitors.
They are displayed automatically by hovering the cursor over the two dedicated icons in each row, without the need to click the mouse.
This makes it easy and quick, for example, to find a game when you don't remember the title but do remember what it looked like.
There is also a handy and immediate search field, great for narrowing down results, for instance, to only titles from a certain year, or those with "donkey" in the name, and so on.
The Spectrum Box is divided into sections, each on a single web page with no nested subpages.
This way, all essential informations are easily visible at a glance.
The largest section of the website is New Games, featuring games released from mid-1993 onwards, after the commercial era of the Spectrum ended and most major software houses had stopped publishing.
It includes mostly homebrews, as well as games that were initially sold but later released for free.
Titles still on sale are listed but not available for download; they will be once released as freeware.
Demos and unfinished / incomplete games are not included. Only finished and/or fully playable titles are featured (e.g., games never officially released by the author(s), where it's unclear whether a final version will ever be made).
The Classic Games section, on the other hand, includes games from the commercial period (1982 to 1993).
Each program / game is:
- individually tested on a range of emulators with different configurations to determine the actual machine / minimum setup required for it to work correctly (and any necessary or usable interfaces).
The indicated minimum machine is the one on which the game works as intended (without glitches)
- during testing, one or two screenshots are also captured (depending also on whether a loading screen is present), and then linked to the corresponding title on the webpage.
In the case of multicolor or ULAplus screens, additional processing in Photoshop was required to ensure accurate display
- provided with a text file containing the link to the original homepage of the author(s)
- accompanied by a readme file (.txt or .doc/.rtf, depending on the content's complexity) containing additional useful informations not included in the original package released by the author(s).
These informations are usually taken from the homepage itself or from forums where the author(s) participated
- often supplemented, from the same sources as above, with extra images (such as inlays, posters, awards, etc.) when these are considered important or even essential
If a game supports ULAplus, the shown screenshot(s) will be the one(s) - if better - with ULAplus enabled.
An emulator that supports ULAplus is SpecEmu (https://specemu.zxe.io).
A program / game released in .dsk format is considered a Spectrum 128 +3 title, even if it's not specific to that machine and doesn't take advantage of its features.
This is due to the fact that +3 disk interfaces (3") never existed for the Spectrum 48/128.
If a game is declared as 128K but runs perfectly on a 48K machine with an AY sound interface, then 48K+AY is listed as the minimum required configuration.
This website is the result of extensive research and frequent, in-depth consultation of many other websites, forums, and resources.
Special thanks to Enrico Maria Giordano, whose help was essential.
Enjoy!
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