Fuse - the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator

What is it?

Fuse (the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator) was originally, and somewhat unsurprisingly, a ZX Spectrum emulator for Unix. However, it has now also been ported to Mac OS X, which may or may not count as a Unix variant depending on your advocacy position. It has also been ported to Windows, the Wii, AmigaOS and MorphOS, which are definitely not Unix variants.

What features does it have?

Accurate 16K, 48K (including the NTSC variant), 128K, +2, +2A and +3 emulation.
Working +3e, SE, TC2048, TC2068, TS2068, Pentagon 128, Pentagon "512" (Pentagon 128 modified for extra memory), Pentagon 1024 and Scorpion ZS 256 emulation.
Runs at true Speccy speed on any computer you're likely to try it on.
Support for loading from .tzx files, including accelerated loading.
Sound (on Windows and Mac OS X, and on systems supporting ALSA, the Open Sound System, SDL or OpenBSD/Solaris's /dev/audio).
Kempston joystick emulation.
Emulation of the various printers you could attach to the Spectrum.
Support for the RZX input recording file format, including 'competition mode'.
Emulation of the Currah μSource, DivIDE, Fuller audio box, Interface 1, Kempston mouse, SpecDrum, Spectrum +3e, ZXATASP and ZXCF interfaces.
Emulation of the Beta 128, +D, Didaktik 80/40, DISCiPLE and Opus Discovery interfaces.
Emulation of the Spectranet and SpeccyBoot interfaces.
Support for the Recreated ZX Spectrum Bluetooth keyboard.

What is it lacking?

Quite a lot! However, it's a lot better than it used to be...

Downloads

Fuse is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. Please read this before downloading Fuse if you're not already familiar with it.

Unix

Packages are available for some Unix distributions; in general, any problems which are specific to the packages should be sent to the package maintainer.

Arch Linux users can get version 1.3.4 from AUR as a PKGBUILD.
Official packages of 1.3.5 for Debian, maintained by Alberto Garcia, are available.
Fedora has packages of 1.3.5 available by Lucian Langa.
FreeBSD has a port of 1.3.5 available as emulators/fuse.
NetBSD users can get version 1.3.5 from pkgsrc (the NetBSD Packages Collection) as emulators/fuse-emulator and emulators/fuse-emulator-utils.
OpenBSD users have version 1.3.5 available as the fuse and fuse-utils package, with thanks to Anthony J. Bentley.
openSUSE users have version 1.3.5 as the Fuse package from Emulators repository.
The Polish Linux Distribution has packages of Fuse 1.3.4 and the utilities.
Slackware users can get version 1.3.5 from SlackBuilds as a build script.
Ubuntu has packages of 1.3.3 available by Alberto Garcia.
Homebrew provides packages of 1.3.4 for macOS as "homebrew/games/fuse-emulator".

Packages of older versions of Fuse are also available for some other distributions:

Gentoo users have an ebuild of 1.1.1 available.
Nokia's Maemo platform has a port of 1.0.0 available by Alberto Garcia.

macOS

A native port to macOS by Fredrick Meunier is available on its own SourceForge project here, as well as a Spotlight importer for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger users. Alternatively, the original version of Fuse will compile on OS X 10.3 (Panther) or later.

Windows

A port to Windows of 1.3.5 by Sergio Baldoví is available here, and the utilities are available here.

Android

BogDan Vatra has ported Fuse 1.3.2 to Android OS, which could run on smartphones, tablets and TVs. Sources are available from GitHub and binaries from Google Play.

Haiku

Adrien Destugues has ported Fuse 1.1.1 to Haiku, available from haikuports as app-emulation/fuse and app-emulation/fuse-utils.

AmigaOS 4

Chris Young has ported Fuse 1.0.0.1 to AmigaOS 4, with binaries available from Aminet as misc/emu/fuse.lha.

MorphOS

Q-Master has ported Fuse 0.10.0.1 to MorphOS, with binaries available from AmiRUS.

PSP

Akop Karapetyan has ported Fuse to the PSP. Binaries and source, based on Fuse 0.10.0.1, are available from the Fuse PSP page.

Wii

A Wii port, based on work by Björn Giesler, is available from WiiBrew. This is based on what is essentially 0.10.0.2.

Gizmondo

A port of 0.9.0 to the Gizmondo tablet is available. The source was available via csie.org.

GP2X

Ben O'Steen has made a GP2X port, based on Fuse 0.6. Binaries and source are available from his homepage.

XBox

Crabfists's has made an Xbox port, based on Fuse 0.6. Binaries and source are available from the FuseX project at SourceForge.

PocketPC

Anders Holmberg's ported Fuse 0.4 to the PocketPC as PocketClive.

Windows Mobile Smartphone

Keith Orbell's then ported PocketClive to the Smartphone as FuseSP.

Source

Installing Fuse

First, check the requirements below and ensure all the libraries you want/need are installed.
Secondly, install libspectrum.
Get the source code (PGP signature) .
The utilities which were previously packaged with Fuse are now available in their own package (PGP signature). Note that you'll still need libspectrum installed to run these.
The source code releases above are signed with the Fuse Release Key, ID D0767AB9, which has fingerprint 064E 0BA9 688F 2699 3267 B1E5 1043 EEEB D076 7AB9. This is different from the key used to sign the 0.6.0(.1) releases as I forgot the passphrase for that key :-(.

Requirements

Required:

X, SDL, svgalib or framebuffer support. If you have GTK+ installed, you'll get a (much) nicer user interface under X.
libspectrum: the Spectrum emulator file format and information library.

Optional:

libgcrypt: the ability to digitally sign RZX files (note that Fuse requires version 1.1.42 or later).
libpng: the ability to save screenshots.
libxml2: the ability to load and save Fuse's current configuration and capture BASIC video functions to SVG.
SDL or libjsw: allow joystick input to be used (not required for joystick emulation).
zlib: support for compressed RZX files and zipped files.
libbzip2: support for certain compressed files.
libaudiofile: support for loading from .wav files.
Versions previous to 0.10.0 used John Elliott's lib765 and libdsk for the +3 support. 0.10.0 and newer include this support natively, so these libraries are no longer necessary (or used).

What's new?

1.3.6

Add Covox interface emulation
Disable accelerate loader while recording RZX files
WidgetUI: Disable RollbackTo menu option
Work around invalid "used bits in last byte" field in TZX tapes
Save SpecDrum level as unsigned in SZX snapshots

1.3.5

Disable tape traps when playing/recording RZX files
WidgetUI: Fix memory leak in file selector
Silently skip PLTT blocks in SZX snapshots
Validate "used bits in last byte" field in TZX tapes
Fix the load of PZX tapes with malformed strings

1.3.4

Fix syntax for "breakpoint read" debugger command.
Fix Z80 unit test 39 to test the right opcode.
Win32: Fix joystick initialisation.
FreeBSD: Use power-of-2 sound buffers.

1.3.3

Add support for the hidden MEMPTR register.
Mark new disks as needing to be saved.
Show more information on disk modification status in menus.
Fix multiple save of disks.
Allow overwriting disk images.
Various minor bugfixes.

1.3.2

Allow keyboard arrow keys to be used as a cursor joystick.
Limit sound generation to less than 500% speed.
WidgetUI: Fix order of Z80 flags in debugger.
Win32: Limit sound generation from 50% to 300%.
Various minor bugfixes.

1.3.1

Warn on inserting disk images for disks larger than the emulated drive.
Win32: Re-enable standard output for Windows builds.
Win32: Minimum supported OS is now Windows 2000.
Various minor bugfixes.

1.3.0

Recreated ZX Spectrum Bluetooth keyboard support.
Reset the emulated machine when auto-loading TRD/SCL disks.
Update the +3e ROMs to v1.43.
WidgetUI: Add an About Fuse dialog with less cluttered text.
Print a summary of enabled features when building Fuse.
Various minor bugfixes.

Development

If you're just want news of new versions and the like, the (low volume) fuse-emulator-announce list is available. If you're interested in the development of Fuse, this is coordinated via the fuse-emulator-devel list and the project page on SourceForge.

The latest version of Fuse is always available by checking out the 'master' branch from the git repository on SourceForge. Note that this isn't guaranteed to compile, let alone work properly. Also, don't expect any support for this version! (You'll also need libspectrum from git; this is from the libspectrum repository). Similarly, the utilities are available in the fuse-utils repository.

One thing which isn't in the SourceForge tracking system (and is now very outdated):

David Gardner has produced a patch to give XVideo support for the Xlib UI, allowing arbitrary sized windows.

Are there any related projects?

libspectrum is the library used by Fuse to handle various file formats.
Mike Wynne's ZX81 emulator, EightyOne is also using Fuse's Z80 core.
Matthew Westcott's JSSpeccy uses a Z80 core based on translating Fuse's core to Javascript.
Alexander Shabarshin's SPRINT, an emulator of the Peters Plus super-Speccy, the Sprinter. SPRINT is using Fuse's Z80 core for its CPU emulation.
z80ex, a Z80 emulation library based on Fuse's Z80 core, used by zemu and PocketSpeccy.