This little guide is for people who want to install an emulator, but don't know where to begin. These instructions are for Windows users, and the emulator I will describe is Real Spectrum, since it's by far the most popular emulator downloaded from the site.
Installing Winzip
The Real Spectrum emulator, and the games on this site are all archive Zip files. To extract these files you will need Winzip, which can be downloaded from the Winzip website. After downloading Winzip, launch the .EXE file and follow the installation instructions.
Installing Real Spectrum
Download the relevant version of the Real Spectrum emulator from the emulator page and the roms from the roms page. Next, double click on the emulator zipfile to launch Winzip, and extract the files to the directory you want to run Real Spectrum from. Repeat for the roms, making sure they're extracted to the same directory. Next, launch the emulator by double clicking the 'realspec.exe' file, and after a few seconds you will hopefully see the following screen...
If Real Spectrum does not start correctly, firstly check that the roms have been extracted to the same directory as the emulator. If they have, check the docs supplied with the emulator (rspecman.html) in case there are any configuration changes specific to your machine that need to be made.
Playing Games
The part you're probably most interested in - loading and running games. First (obviously enough) you have to download the games you want, and then unzip them into a directory somewhere - pehaps a 'games' directory under the one where Real Spectrum is installed (you don't actually have to unzip them, as Real Spectrum can handle zip files, but for the moment we will).
There are many different types of Spectrum snapshot file, but for the sake of simplicity we will concentrate on the following - .SNA and .Z80, which are Memory Snapshots, and .TAP and .TZX which are Tape Images. The .SNA and .Z80 are easiest to load. Simply press 'F5', navigate to the directory the game is in (see picture below), highlight the relevant game and hit 'Enter'
.TAP and .TZX files are slightly more complicated. To load these files, hit F7 to bring up the file selector and again select the file to be loaded. Instead of loading automatically, the emulator will return to the Spectrum screen. To load the file, either take the 'Tape Loader' or 'Loader' option from the menu (select menu options with the cursor keys and Enter) or, if the emulator is in 16K or 48K mode, type LOAD "" ('J' key then 'CTRL' and 'P' twice) and hit enter. The game will then load.
This guide is intended to get you up and running, and therefore is very limited in scope. If you are still having problems, the best thing to do is read the documentation supplied with the emulator (boring, I know). Real Spectrum has lots of nice features, and the best way to find out about them is to have a quick read through the docs supplied...
