One emulator, three platforms

ZenZX runs natively on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the same GUI, the same feature set, and your choice of look on all three — no platform is the "real" version with the others catching up.

The interface

• Three themes — Light, Dark, and a Spectrum-flavoured theme that leans into the machine's own bright colour palette — plus a choice of fonts, including a genuine ZX Spectrum bitmap font for anyone who wants the interface itself to look period-correct.
• A proper menu bar — Machine, Custom ROM, Tape, Floppy Disk, Snapshot, View, and Theme — covering everything from switching models to managing tape and disk media, without needing the command line for day-to-day use.
• An on-screen keyboard — the full Spectrum keyboard layout, including the shifted symbols and keywords the real keyboard's legends show, for anyone without a physical Spectrum-style keyboard handy.
• Drag and drop — drop a tape, snapshot, or disk image straight onto the window and it loads, matched by file extension.

Practical details

The window remembers your settings — theme, font, zoom level, whether the menu bar is pinned open — across sessions, so you set it up once. File dialogs for opening and saving media use a proper native-feeling picker rather than a bare text prompt.

Why it matters

An emulator you actually enjoy using day to day needs to feel native wherever you run it, and it needs a UI that gets out of the way — or, if you want it to, leans all the way into the machine it's emulating. ZenZX aims for both: quick and unobtrusive when you just want to play, and properly Spectrum-flavoured when you want it to feel like the real thing.