Real +3 disk support

The ZX Spectrum +3 was the only Spectrum with a built-in floppy disk drive, and it's the model most emulators shortchange — disk support is fiddly to get right, so a lot of them skip it or fake it. ZenZX emulates the real +3 floppy disc controller.

What you can do

• Boot a genuine +3 disk image (.dsk) from the command line with -disk=game.dsk, or load one at runtime without restarting.
• Insert a blank disk and format it from within the emulator.
• Save and load to and from the virtual disk exactly as +3 software expects — a game's own save feature, a +3DOS file copy, all of it.
• Eject and swap disks, and check Disk Info for the currently loaded image's filename and whether it's been modified but not yet saved.

All of this lives under the Floppy Disk menu, alongside the +3's own BASIC and Loader options at boot.

Why this matters

The +3's disk format has real, specific rules — where the directory sits on the disk, how files are laid out, what counts as a valid header — and software written for it depends on those rules being followed exactly. An emulator that gets this approximately right will fail on real +3 software in ways that are hard to diagnose. ZenZX's floppy controller is built to the actual +3DOS specification, so +3 disk images behave the way they would on the real hardware — including edge cases most implementations miss.