Fuse - the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator
What is it?
Fuse (the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator) was originally, and somewhat unsurprisingly, a ZX Spectrum emulator for Unix. However, it has now also been ported to Mac OS X, which may or may not count as a Unix variant depending on your advocacy position. It has also been ported to Windows, AmigaOS and MorphOS, which are definitely not Unix variants.
What features does it have?
- Accurate 16K, 48K, 128K, +2, +2A and +3 emulation.
- Working +3e, SE, TC2048, TC2068, TS2068, Pentagon 128, Pentagon "512" (Pentagon 128 modified for extra memory), Pentagon 1024 and Scorpion ZS 256 emulation.
- Runs at true Speccy speed on any computer you're likely to try it on.
- Support for loading from .tzx files, including accelerated loading.
- Sound (on Windows and Mac OS X, and on systems supporting ALSA, the Open Sound System, SDL or OpenBSD/Solaris's /dev/audio).
- Kempston joystick emulation.
- Emulation of the various printers you could attach to the Spectrum.
- Support for the RZX input recording file format, including 'competition mode'.
- Emulation of the DivIDE, Interface I, +D, Beta 128, Kempston mouse, Spectrum +3e, ZXATASP and ZXCF interfaces.
What is it lacking?
- Quite a lot! However, it's a lot better than it used to be...
What do I need to run Fuse?
Unix, Linux, BSD etc.
- Required:
-
- X, SDL, svgalib or framebuffer support. If you have GTK+ installed, you'll get a (much) nicer user interface under X.
- libspectrum: the Spectrum emulator file format and information library.
- Optional:
-
- libgcrypt: the ability to digitally sign RZX files (note that Fuse requires version 1.1.42 or later).
- libpng: the ability to save screenshots.
- libxml2: the ability to load and save Fuse's current configuration.
- libjsw: allow joystick input to be used (not required for joystick emulation).
- zlib: support for compressed RZX files.
- libbzip2: support for certain compressed files.
- libaudiofile: support for loading from .wav files.
- libsamplerate: higher quality sound.
- Versions previous to 0.10.0 used John Elliott's lib765 and libdsk for the +3 support. 0.10.0 includes this support natively, so these libraries are no longer necessary (or used).
Mac OS X
A native port to OS X by Fredrick Meunier is available on its own SourceForge project here, as well as a Spotlight importer for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger users. Alternatively, the original version of Fuse will compile on OS X 10.3 (Panther) or later.
Windows
A port to Windows by Marek Januszewski and Stuart Brady is available here (SHA1 hash). This is also mirrored at World of Spectrum: Fuse (signature).
AmigaOS 4
Chris Young has ported Fuse to AmigaOS 4, with binaries available from Aminet as misc/emu/fuse.lha.
MorphOS
Q-Master has ported Fuse to MorphOS, with binaries available from AmiRUS.
Where can I get it from?
Fuse is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Please read this before downloading Fuse if you're not already familiar with it.
Source
Binaries
Packages are available for some Unix distributions; in general, any problems which are specific to the packages should be sent to the package maintainer.
What's new?
0.10.0
- Improved upd765 FDC emulation
- Loading acceleration
- Automatic saves while RZX recording
- Improved Win32 UI
- Improved widget UI
Development
If you're just want news of new versions and the like, the (low volume) fuse-emulator-announce list is available. If you're interested in the development of Fuse, this is coordinated via the fuse-emulator-devel list and the project page on SourceForge.
The latest version of Fuse is always available by checking out the 'trunk/fuse' directory from the Subversion repository on SourceForge. Note that this isn't guaranteed to compile, let alone work properly. Also, don't expect any support for this version! (You'll also need libspectrum from Subversion; this is in the 'trunk/libspectrum' directory). Similarly, the utilities are available in the 'trunk/fuse-utils' directory.
One thing which isn't in the SourceForge tracking system (and is now very outdated):
- David Gardner has produced a patch to give XVideo support for the Xlib UI, allowing arbitrary sized windows.
Are there any related projects?
- libspectrum is the library used by Fuse to handle various file formats.
- Alexander Shabarshin is working on SPRINT, an emulator of the Peters Plus super-Speccy, the Sprinter. SPRINT is using Fuse's Z80 core for its CPU emulation.
- Mike Wynne's ZX81 emulator, EightyOne is also using Fuse's Z80 core.
- Crabfists's Xbox port, FuseX.
- Ben O'Steen's GP2X port, Fuse-GP2X.
- Keith Orbell's Smartphone port, FuseSP.
- Anders Holmberg's PocketPC port, PocketClive.
- z80ex, a Z80 emulation library based on Fuse's Z80 core, used by zemu and PocketSpeccy.