Today, I had a flash-back on how I first entered this computer world, it was a long time ago, and it was on a Z80 processor based machine. Sure, I had 48k of RAM, and 16k of ROM, but I was happy. I had to load games from tapes, some times wait 10,20 minutes, only to discover that the tape got damaged and I can not load the game or program anymore. The graphics were awful, compared to what we have today, but for me, and I think anyone who used to own such a machine at that time, it was something really cool.

The main reason for writing the tutorial below, is because I needed to play R-Type , probably the best Arcade game I played when I was using my old computer. If you are familiar with it, then you will know how addictive it can get at times. Anyway, I decided to go with the fuse-emulator, and not with M.A.M.E, probably because I wanted to have a better experience of the whole Z80, Sinclair Spectrum, BASIC and so on world.

First we need to pick a place to install the fuse-emulator software and download it:

$ cd ~

$ mkdir fuse

$ cd fuse

$ wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fuse-emulator/fuse-0.9.0.tar.gz

We will also need to install the libspectrum library, fuse needs that to run:

$ wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fuse-emulator/libspectrum-0.4.0.tar.gz

$ tar zxvf libspectrum-0.4.0.tar.gz

$ cd libspectrum-0.4.0

$ ./configure –prefix=/usr

$ make

$ sudo make install

$ cd ..

Next we need to build the fuse emulator:

$ tar zxvf fuse-0.9.0.tar.gz

$ cd fuse-0.9.0

$ ./configure –prefix=/usr

$ sudo make && make install

$ cd ..

If everything went fine, we can do some cleaning and then test the emulator:

$ cd ..;rm -rf fuse

$ fuse

Now we have a working Z80 emulator, we can play around with it. Make sure you go to help menu, and look at the keyboard layout, so you will not get confused it some keys are not doing what you want them to do. Next, we need to download a games for it, and try them out, I chose to load the game from a tape file ( fuse supports tzx, and tap file formats) , instead of snapshots, it makes the emulator look more realistic:

$ mkdir z80-games

$ cd z80-games

$ wget ftp://ftp.nvg.ntnu.no/pub/sinclair/tapes/custom_loaders/r_type.zip

$ unzip r_type.zip ; rm -rf r_type.zip

$ fuse –machine=128 –tape=R-TYPE.TAP

Tapes are normally very small, games need to fit in a very small memory space, 64 or 128k. You can find more game tapes at the following links:

• http://www.tzxvault.org
• ftp://ftp.nvg.ntnu.no/pub/sinclair/tzx/
• ftp://ftp.nvg.ntnu.no/pub/sinclair/tapes/

There are also other web sites on the Internet providing Z80 game tapes, but I think you will not have time to play all the games on these three. I would like to also mention that you can use the GUI to load tapes ( Media –> Tape –> Open… — LOAD “” J, ALT+P, ALT+P). Also, if somehow you manage to block the emulator, meaning the game freezes, you can just go to the Machine menu, and Reset it. For advanced users, the emulator also provides a Debugger, and a Memory Browser.