I’ve recently installed the ZX Spectrum emulator Fuse for Mac OS X. I’m trying to find a way to output a transcript to a text file while playing games on the emulator, but I’m not having much success. What am I missing?
In the Preferences menu under Peripherals, there are check boxes to “Emulate Printers” and “Emulate ZX Printer”, which I have checked. There are menus to choose the location for a graphic output file “printout.pbm” and a text output file “printout.txt”.
I have not used Fuse. Is there an emulator option or preference to output all text to a file, or to the printer? In my experience of 8-bit emulators those are not common options at the emulator level, at least in their own right, or at all times. It’s because in circumstances where the cursor could ever be moved backwards, the results are unprintable. So the mode is restricted to circumstances where printing is screen-position agnostic (e.g. printing out a BASIC program listing). Or, the emulator might offer its own workarounds. Like it might have an option to COPY all text that’s on the screen right now, but you have to hit a key to make that happen each time.
I assume there’s no actual TRANSCRIPT command you can use in the ZX game.
If the game’s in BASIC, your best chance may be to try switching output to the printer in the ZX environment before you run the game – if the ZX can do such a thing. In my quick google on the subject, I could only find how to dump BASIC program listings to the printer, or print lines from within a program. I didn’t see a command like the Apple’s PR#1 that would send all text output to a printer, but I’m no ZX expert.
-Wade
There are only a handful of games that include built-in routines to print the output to a printer; which is what you’d need to use that feature in Fuse. They tend to be older titles like The Hobbit.
Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to produce a transcript of a ZX Spectrum text adventure.
Are there particular games you’re looking to get the output for?
One possibility would be to switch to a different emulator.
ZEsarUX is a little idiosyncratic but the programmers has chucked in a load of features just aimed at text adventures; such as a mapping tool, tools for Gilsoft family adventures & also the GAC, and even things like AI images off text descriptions!
See: GitHub - chernandezba/zesarux: ZEsarUX - ZX Second-Emulator And Released for UniX
This other feature might be what you need, though:
But that links directly with a text to speech program. I don’t know if you can somehow get it to output to a text file. I must have a play about with that myself. zesarux/src/FAQ at main · chernandezba/zesarux · GitHub
What I would say, though, is that the author of the program is usually quite up for building new features so maybe reach out to him?
Cutting a video with a screen recording software wouldn’t help, I assume?
Perhaps similar to grueslayer’s idea, but I understand that there is software that can identify text in pictures, so if you make screen dumps and convert them to text that might be possible(?)…
It looks like there is a way to export screenshots as .png files (and as .scr and .slt files). However, manually saving those, running OCR, stitching it together, eliminating duplicated text… it seems like it would almost be easier to manually type it into a text file at that point.
It looks like Fuse does have a way to create a movie recording. I haven’t played around with it but it could be an option.
There’s also an “Emulator Recording” option in the menu that I haven’t tried. I wonder whether it would create a step-through file of the gameplay or something like that?
Spectrum emulators allow you to create RZX files, which are “recordings” of the state of the computer. In the Speccy community we use them a lot to create videos of gameplay footage and the like, as you can create “save” points where you can rollback the state of the emulator. I’ve created lots of walkthrough videos this way. As have lots of other players. The advantage of the format is if you make a mistake you can rewind to an earlier point in the game. Other people can load the file into their emulators too.
There used to be a site that hosted the RZX files, but the owner died a few years ago. A lot of the files are in the main Spectrum archives powered by ZXDB. [Edit: The RZX site is still up, but not updated https://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/ ]
Use Spectrum Computing going forward. For example, here is a game page with all the original game files on, the RZX emulator file and also a link to a video of the RZX file being played back in an emulator. An Everyday Tale of a Seeker of Gold - Spectrum Computing
This is only tangentially on-topic, but I just noticed that the built-in macOS VoiceOver image recognition can read the on-screen text and describe the images of some emulators. Not including Fuse, unfortunately, but the ZX Spectrum emulator here works.
In theory, you could use this to copy the output to a text document, but only screen by screen, so it would be a huge amount of work for an entire game.
Thanks, this looks like it will work for what I need. I’ll look through the Fuse help to see how to create a RZX file. Do you know of any tutorials out there about how to do this?
Looks like you probably pass -r filename or --record filename, and -p filename to play one back?
Fuse isn’t my emulator of choice, but once you’ve loaded in your game, you just use File > Recording > Record and name the rzx file. Once you’ve done that then it’s “insert” to log a snapshot point and “delete” to roll back to that save point. (I imagine this may vary depending on platform).
There are various command line options for RZXs; I’d look at the helpfiles for those; you can set many of them in options > RZX too. (Things like auto save points).