pillow_zx_spectrum

Pillow loaders for ZX Spectrum loading screens, extracted from tape, disk and snapshot files in the wild.

Open a tape, disk image, or snapshot with Image.open(...) and Pillow gives you a 256×192 RGB image with the original Spectrum colours. Files that contain multiple screens (multi-load games, multi-side disks) expose them as Pillow frames via seek() / n_frames.

Install

pip install pillow_zx_spectrum

Command line

Open a Spectrum image up in your image viewer, or write a found frame to disk:

zx-screen "Glug Glug (1984)(CRL).tap"
zx-screen "Moonwalker (Erbe).dsk" --frame 1 -o moonwalker.png

Usage

from PIL import Image
import pillow_zx_spectrum  # registers the plugins on import

img = Image.open("Glug Glug (1984)(CRL).tap")
img.save("loading-screen.png")
print(img.size)                   # (256, 192)
print(img.info["pixel_aspect_ratio"])  # (1, 1)

Multi-screen containers (disks, multi-load tapes) expose every screen they hold. Iterate with the stock Pillow helper:

from PIL import ImageSequence

img = Image.open("Moonwalker (Erbe).dsk")
print(img.n_frames)  # e.g. 2
for i, frame in enumerate(ImageSequence.Iterator(img)):
    frame.save(f"moonwalker.{i}.png")

How it works

A file becomes a stream of (addr, body, name, kind) events, and if one is the same size as a SCREEN$, or it overlaps the $4000-$5AFF graphics region, then you'll get an image for each one (assuming it looks sensible).

Supported formats

Most of them tbh:

Tape

Disk

Microdrive

Snapshot

For 128K snapshots the shadow screen (bank 7) might be exposed as an extra frame.

Unsupported

You'll get UnidentifiedImageErrors for sampled audio tapes, custom loaders, copy protected games and other weird things. It doesn't run any Z80 machine code so programmatically made screens aren't decoded.

License

WTFPL with one additional clause:

1. Don't blame me.

Do what you like, but you're to blame.