A proper Spectrum sprite editor

Drawing pixel art is one thing; drawing pixel art that obeys the ZX Spectrum's actual colour hardware is another. zenimate is built around that constraint from the ground up, not as an afterthought.

The toolset

A full twelve-tool palette — brush, select, fill, eyedropper, line, rectangle, circle, triangle, hexagon, text, pan, and zoom — for drawing directly onto a pixel grid, with smooth wheel-zoom and inertia-carrying pan so working at high zoom on fine detail doesn't feel disconnected from the full picture.

Real Spectrum colour

Alongside the pixel bitmap, you paint colour separately, per 8×8 character cell, with one ink and one paper colour each — exactly the attribute-clash constraint real Spectrum hardware imposes. What you see while drawing is what a real Spectrum would actually display, clash and all, not an idealised full-colour preview that quietly stops being true the moment you export.

Animation

Sprites are multi-frame from the start: build a sequence frame by frame, with insert, duplicate, copy/paste, and delete all available from the frame menu, and preview the animation as you work rather than only after exporting.

Bringing artwork in

Import an existing image and zenimate reduces it to the Spectrum's real palette and attribute-cell rule automatically — picking the two most representative colours per cell rather than a naive nearest-colour-per-pixel pass, so imported art keeps its shape instead of dissolving into speckled noise.

Why it matters

A sprite that looks right in a generic editor can still be impossible to actually show on a real Spectrum, once you hit the attribute-clash rule for real. zenimate draws inside that constraint the whole time, so what you make is guaranteed to be something the machine can actually display.