Troublesome SNA files - rescued by conversion to Z80 format

[scuba-hacker]

I have a lot of games in SNA format sourced many years ago - we're talking the 1990's when there were Spectrum emulators running on Atari STs and Amigas! Back then these emulators were Public Domain (essentially an MIT licence) or Shareware and were ordered on floppy disks from paper catalogues.

SNA file format is either poorly documented or has evolved over the years as many cause problems across different emulators and there is no consistency in this. ESP-Rainbow is having trouble with many of my favourite old games that were snapped back in the dark ages.

There is a tool that can help with this!

Fuse is a Spectrum emulator that's been around for a long time and has a separate download called fuse-utils which contains the tool snapconv that converts SNA to Z80.

The link below has installers for Windows and Linux - no Mac version unfortunately (perhaps someone can build a binary?) I've used the Linux version - it requires a separate package install and a build of the code but the README is nice and clear to follow.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-emulator/files/fuse-utils/1.4.3/

There's always the ESP-Rainbow website to try downloading the game instead, but due to licensing not all are available through the ZXDB backend library.

@cgreening - if you're interested at taking a peek at the file structure I can send you some of these SNA files. In time, it would be great to have this tool added to the ESP-Rainbow website.

[cgreening]

We should have support for SNA files already. So fingers crossed, you should be able to go here: https://esp32rainbow.com/file-browser And drop the SNA files to upload them. Let me know if it doesn't work and I'll do some investigating. Cheers Chris

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On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 7:07 AM Mark B. Jones aka The Scuba Hacker < ***@***.***> wrote: I have a lot of games in SNA format sourced many years ago - we're talking the 1990's when there were Spectrum emulators running on Atari STs and Amigas! Back then these emulators were Public Domain (essentially an MIT licence) or Shareware and were ordered on floppy disks from paper catalogues. SNA file format is either poorly documented or has evolved over the years as many cause problems across different emulators and there is no consistency in this. ESP-Rainbow is having trouble with many of my favourite old games that were snapped back in the dark ages. There is a tool that can help with this! Fuse is a Spectrum emulator that's been around for a long time and has a separate download called fuse-utils which contains the tool *snapconv* that converts SNA to Z80. The link below has installers for Windows and Linux - no Mac version unfortunately (perhaps someone can build a binary?) I've used the Linux version - it requires a separate package install and a build of the code but the README is nice and clear to follow. *https://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-emulator/files/fuse-utils/1.4.3/ <https://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-emulator/files/fuse-utils/1.4.3/>* There's always the ESP-Rainbow website to try downloading the game instead, but due to licensing not all are available through the ZXDB backend library. @cgreening <https://github.com/cgreening> - if you're interested at taking a peek at the file structure I can send you some of these SNA files. In time, it would be great to have this tool added to the ESP-Rainbow website. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#10>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAFMTAFF36A3M34HFDNMD7D3I44Q7AVCNFSM6AAAAACBWZRB4SVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ERDJONRXK43TNFXW4OZYGU4TGNJYGM> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>