The ZX Spectrum emulator that remasters games in real time
AI upscaling, less colour clash, sound remaster and CRT filters. Your favourite Spectrum games sharper than ever, on Windows.
10 REM COMPARE
See the difference
Drag the ray. On the left the original Spectrum, on the right ZXRay. Zoom in to see every pixel.
A neural network on the graphics card, colours from the original.
20 REM FEATURES
What ZXRay does
ZXTAL core
Our own emulation, exact to the T-state. 48K, 128K, +2, +2A and +3 with disks.
AI upscaling
A neural network on your graphics card draws at four times the resolution. Colours always come from the original.
Remaster
Smooth edges and highlights without AI. Runs on any PC.
Less colour clash
The Spectrum colours in 8×8 squares. ZXRay greatly reduces sprites recolouring what they touch.
Sound remaster
Beeper and AY chip with wider stereo and reverb. In 128K games instruments play the tune.
33,000 games
The ZXDB catalogue: a game you don’t have downloads and starts with one click.
A tape in seconds
TAP, TZX, PZX, Z80, SNA, SZX, DSK and ZIP. You still get to enjoy the loading screen.
CRT filters
Scanlines, Trinitron aperture grille, shadow mask and slot mask.
Made for playing
Save anywhere (F5), gamepad or keyboard, fullscreen, English and Czech.
30 REM TECH
Under the hood
ZXTAL C
Our own core written from scratch: the Z80 including undocumented behaviour, a cycle-exact ULA, the AY-3-8912 and the µPD765A floppy controller. It computes a frame in under 0.16 ms; the real Spectrum takes 20 ms.
Real-ESRGAN AI
The animevideov3 neural network upscales 4× in 32×32 tiles. Whatever is moving is drawn by a fast path first and then blended in.
ONNX Runtime + DirectML GPU
The network runs on the graphics card through DirectX 12, integrated GPUs included. Without one it runs on the CPU.
Python + NumPy CPU
The image remaster, the colour clash fix and the sound mixer.
pygame-ce + SDL2 I/O
Window, rendering, sound and gamepads.
ZXDB DATA
The open ZX Spectrum games database (ODbL). Games download from Spectrum Computing.
40 REM VIDEO
Two minutes of ZXRay
The core, AI, colour clash, sound and the catalogue. Turn the sound on.
50 REM REQUIREMENTS
Minimum requirements
- System
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
- Processor
- 64-bit, 2 cores
- Memory
- 4 GB RAM
- Graphics
- any; for AI one with DirectX 12 (integrated is fine)
- Disk
- 200 MB
- Internet
- only for the game catalogue
Developed and tested on integrated AMD Radeon 680M graphics. Without DirectX 12 the AI mode runs on the processor, more slowly.