1 CASTLEVANIA: SPECTRAL INTERLUDE - HOW TO PLAY ON ZX SPECTRUM VEGA

Dear Readers,

I finally got this excellent free fangame from spectralinterlude.com to work on my ZX Spectrum Vega! Today I'll tell you how I did it.

What I was doing wrong was simply trying to load the game from my MicroSD card. The Vega seems to load 48K games by default so it needs a configuration file to run this 128K game. This configuration file will not just be for the model, but also for the controls. Here I'll tell you how to make one.

Here are the steps:

-Download "castlevania_si_en.tap" from spectralinterlude.com
-Put it on the MicroSD card
-Open a new Notepad document
-Save as..
-File name: "castlevania_si_en.zxk"
-Save as Type: "All Files"
-Put it on the MicroSD card in the same directory as "castlevania_si_en.tap"
-Copy and paste the following paragraph into "castlevania_si_en.zxk" and save:

T:Castlevania: Spectral Interlude
F:castlevania_si_en.tap
M:128
K:;Q;A;O;P;0;SP;M;Q;1;2;H
D:;Up, Jump, Enter Door;Kneel, Take, (x2)Drop;Left;Right;Game Map;Whip, Read, Talk;Secondary Weapon;Jump;Previous Weapon;Next Weapon;Skip Text, Exit Game

Explanation:
T: is the title of the game as it'll appear on the ZX Spectrum Vega menu.
F: is the game .tap file to which this configuration file is applied.
M:128 is the model of Spectrum this game uses. This part is vital to get it running.
K: is the key configuration for the Vega's buttons. The above is what I suggest.
D: is what appears on the help screen describing the controls.

I hope this helps! I learned how to make configuration files from this section of the Vega company's website: retrocomputerslimited.com/vega/configuring-a-game/

From there you can download the Keymapping Instructions pdf with more explanations on configurations such as how to do cheat pokes etc.