Speccy-related Utilties

Over the years I've produced a few little programs of varying uses. Most of these have now been superceded by much better software, but if you liked the old stuff or you're a 'non-Windows' user then you might find something useful in here.

BMP2SPEC version 1.1!

BMP2SPEC is a program I wrote when I was bored which turns out to be quite useful on occasions.... It takes a Windows .BMP file and converts it into a .TAP file containing the Spectrum SCREEN$ equivalent. Fun to play with, and very useful for porting sprites to your Speccy! Comes with a copy of Melbourne Draw for touching up, and a .TAP file full of examples! Worth seeing just for the digitised picture from Bottom! I also used this program to create the rather nice loading screen for 'Manic Miner - Tales from a Parallel Universe' (see above)..... Later, Derek Jolly made a small enhancement to the program to allow you to name the SCREEN$ file that it produces. And as I'm always pleased when someone pays attention to something that I do, I thought I'd put the improved version up here. Thanks, Derek!

More recently I converted the whole shebang to Java instead of C, just for fun. This should (in theory) make it portable to any format capable of running a Java virtual machine. That version's included here too!

Click HERE to download the C version (48K ZIP file)
Click HERE to download the Java version (38K ZIP file)

DEMGT version 1.1!

DEMGT is a small utility that I wrote to get around a bug in version 3.03 of Gerton Lunter's otherwise perfect PC Speccy emulator, Z80. Z80 3.0 was available in two versions, one with MGT/PLUS-D emulation and one without. Unfortunately, if someone with MGT/PLUS-D emulation makes a snap with this emulation turned on, the resulting snapshot always looks for the ROM, which may not be there even if you have a registered version, and causes a crash back to DOS if it doesn't find it! DEMGT fixes these snapshots so that they can be loaded into ANY version 3 Z80.

Since the release of version 3.05 of Z80, the bug has been fixed! This means that DEMGT is now living on borrowed time...! ;-)
However, I've decided to keep it here for now, as not everyone will have upgraded as yet.....

Click HERE to download the program (8K ZIP file)

BINTAP version 1.0!

Well, here's a different kettle of fish altogether! BINTAP lets you transfer ANY binary or text file from your 'grown-up' computer to the Speccy via .TAP files. The major use of this is that it allows you to assemble Z80 machine code using a cross assembler such as TASM and then convert the output into a format which is easily readable by the Spectrum emulators! So what are you waiting for? Download it and write some new games!