Reading text off a Spectrum screen

zx scr ocr reads text straight off a rendered Spectrum screen — matching each character cell against the real ROM font — and gives it back to you as plain, readable text.

What it's for

Plenty of Spectrum software has text on screen that isn't stored as text anywhere accessible — a game's status display, an old adventure's location description, a program's menu. If you can get a screen image of it, zx scr ocr can read it, without you retyping what you see by hand.

It works from a .scr file, or from a screen pulled straight out of a snapshot with zx scr fromsnap — so the whole path from "a saved game state" to "readable text from what was on screen" is a couple of commands, not a manual transcription job.

How it works

Recognition is built on a proper bitmap font reader matched directly against the genuine Spectrum ROM character set, cell by cell — not a general-purpose image OCR engine pointed at a screenshot. That's what makes it reliable on Spectrum output specifically: it's matching against the exact font the machine actually drew, not guessing at an unfamiliar typeface.

Why it matters

Old software often has no other way to get its text out — no source code, no separate text file, nothing but pixels on a screen. zx scr ocr turns that screen into something you can search, copy, or archive properly, straight from the image.