You can play digital files from anything that converts to analog audio with 3.5mm headphone jack.

Your computer, mp3 player, smart phone, etc. Then just input into the spectrum.

Download games, load, play.

that sounds so much simpler than i thought it would be, so i can just put the files on my smartphone as mp3 files, plug that in and run them from that? would they just play through google play music player on the phone or would there be seperate app i would have to download to run them properly?

>>3242958
I mean, there are type ins but...
>>3242983
http://mrpjevans.com/2013/04/load-zx-spectrum-games-in-seconds/

Apparently you have to use some kind of special player. I doubt MP3s would work as the spectrum was created far before the format.

Honestly, if the problem is lack of a tape player then you'd save the hassle by buying a Spectrum +2, which has a built in tape player, and selling that one.

>>3242983
yes you can play audio files out into the spectrum to play games

>>3242990
ah i already have the tape deck, i bought one at the same time at the speccy, i just have to wait until next payday to actualy buy some tapes for it, im just looking for a way to play some games until i can start building the collection up

Spectrum just uses ordinary analog cassette recording though, not the digital recording on the C64?

>>3243002
Yeah, I'd probably emulate for now. Speccy games shouldn't be too bad, I have seen job lots of 10-20 games being sold for around £15 on ebay before. That said, individual games might be more expensive.
>>3243005
I think so. It was a fairly low cost machine with lots of corners cut, heck some 16k Spectrums were actually 48K Spectrums with 32k of RAM not working.

I'm pretty sure only the Atari 8-bits and Commodores used digital tapes and almost any other home computer had standard analog ones.

To put CAS files from Spectrum emulators on a physical tape, you need a converter program to turn them into a WAV file which can be recorded by plugging the cassette recorder into your PC's audio out jack.

How do I Spec online?

it's quite easy
>get male to male headphone jack (3.5mm trs)
>download zx spectrum roms online
>download tapir
>load into program
>connect headphone jack from computer to "tape" port on speccy
>type "load" into spectrum then enter twice
>press play in tapir

You should see the tape data being streamed to the ram on your screen in the form of coloured bars, this is how you know the game is loading.
Try not to bump the speccy or cables while it's loading or else you may cause corruption in graphics due to noise in the signal.
I recommend Chase HQ to see some cool graphics for such a basic machine

www.worldofspectrum.org/utilities.html

>>3242983
I do a similar thing with my msx

>>3242983
WAV is better. The sound needs to be as raw as humanly possible.

I'd avoid typing in the games manually. Yeah, type-in games exist, but they were rarely any good, just little BASIC exercises from teenage coders.