Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

This is surreal. I'm sitting here playing Psion Chess. But not the Series 5 version, or even the Series 3a or Series 3 version. This is the original Psion Chess as programmed by David Potter and others in the early 1980s, during the very earliest days of Psion Software for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. But I'm playing it on a state-of-the-art Series 5....

The magic is courtesy of those clever programmers at Palmtop BV, who have knocked up this Spectrum emulator in their spare time. Given the fact that it's been released as freeware and that there are now thousands of Spectrum games available on the internet, this opens up a rather large free source of games to the bored Series 5 owner. Yes, yes, I know that in theory all these games are copyright and so forth, but they've been widely available in the public domain now for 10 years or so and the original authors have long since moved on to bigger and better things. There are ftp sites on the net where you can grab just about every Spectrum game ever released, but to whet your appetite here's Asteroids, Automania, Deep Strike, Lords of Midnight, Pipemania, Psion Chess, Super Chopper, Turbo Esprit and Zaxxon.

Palmtop BV first released this emulator with a 1:1 aspect ratio, which was clever but also a recipe for eye-strain. This new v0.5 beta version adds a full-width screen and sound support, which makes the games about ten times more playable. You can grab your copy from their web site.

Critics will rightly point out that the graphics are still very primitive by Psion standards, the audio effects sound more like a strangled parrot and that the game speed is at times unfeasably slow, but I don't think much of that matters. The Spectrum 'retro' scene is all about having some fun and reliving memories of a by-gone era.

You can customise just about everything in the emulation, from sound to 'joystick'-support, to display size to game speed. It's all rather impressive and Palmtop are to be congratulated on putting the project in the public domain.

Steve Litchfield, September 1997

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