ZX Spectrum tape: TZX and TAP to sound

No. The tool turns a tape into sound and sound back into a tape — the game runs on your real Spectrum (or a clone: Pentagon, Timex, or an Amstrad CPC for .cdt files). To play on screen you need an emulator, which is a different program.

Yes, on the «Make a tape» tab. You get more than a file with a game: the tape restores the screen, the whole memory and the processor registers, so play resumes exactly where the snapshot was taken. 48K only — 128K snapshots are refused outright, they hold eight memory pages and such a tape carries three. The loader is verified against a real 48K ROM: all twelve registers come back byte for byte.

In order: raise the volume (70–90% is usually right), turn off the equaliser, audio enhancement and loudness levelling on the phone, try the "Invert the signal" switch, and check the cable really is in the EAR socket. The "Check the volume" button tells you whether the machine hears anything at all.

From the page — the signal is synthesised exactly and nothing degrades it on the way. A downloaded WAV is for playing from another device or player. MP3 is often said to "smooth the edges" and be unusable: we measured it, and at ordinary settings (64 kbps and up) the edge jitter stays inside what the ROM tolerates anyway. WAV is still the safer choice — it depends on neither the codec nor the player settings. What genuinely gets in the way is phone "audio enhancement" and the equaliser: turn those off.

On playback, nothing special: their timings are stored in the TZX and reproduced exactly. When digitising a cassette such blocks read noticeably worse than standard ones, so unrecognised stretches are kept in the TZX as raw pulses: even where the data was not understood, the tape still loads.

TAP holds only standard-speed data blocks — compact, but with no pauses, tones or turbo loaders. TZX holds the tape itself, down to the shape of the pulses. When in doubt, save TZX.

Yes: connect the tape deck input to the headphone output, press record and start playback. It will read back both on a Spectrum and in this tool.

Amstrad CPC .cdt files are built exactly like TZX and open here. Other machines' formats (MSX .cas, BBC .uef, Commodore .tap) are not read yet.

Parsing the tape, synthesising the signal and reading a recording all run as JavaScript in your browser. The page itself, the rating widget and anonymous click statistics travel between the server and the browser; the contents of your tape are not part of that statistics.