A retro media player

Play198x

Play198x plays retro media in your browser. Drop a file below to play it — nothing you feed it ever leaves your browser.

Drop a file here

Or choose a file from your device

Pictures: SCREEN$ · Koala · Art Studio · ILBM
Music: ProTracker MOD · AY · SID
Containers: ZIP · Amiga ADF

What Play198x is

Play198x renders media. It does not boot a whole machine.

A ZX Spectrum SCREEN$ or a Commodore 64 bitmap opens the way a photo does; a ProTracker module plays the way an MP3 does: read, decoded, and shown or heard. AY and SID tunes carry small player programs; Play198x runs those against Emu198x's CPU and sound-chip cores in a deliberately minimal host, without booting a Spectrum or C64.

Every file you drop stays in your browser. Play198x decodes it there and never uploads, stores, or transmits it.

What it plays today

Play198x reads seven formats: ZX Spectrum SCREEN$ and AY, Commodore 64 Koala Paint, Art Studio and SID, Amiga IFF ILBM, and ProTracker MOD.

Callable PSID tunes play without a ROM. RSID, self-driven PSID, multi-SID and tunes that read a mapped Commodore ROM are recognised and declined with the reason. RSID and self-driven PSID belong to Emu198x because they require a continuously scheduled C64; the others are outside Play198x’s deliberately bounded callable SID surface.

It opens plain files, ZIP archives, and Amiga ADF disk images (the standard density; not the high-density format), and decompresses PowerPacker-compressed entries on the way in. A ZIP of supported files opens, and an ADF opens. A ZIP of ADFs — the shape most TOSEC Amiga sets use — opens too, but the disk image inside it is listed as unrecognised. This player reads a disk image you drop on it, not one nested inside an archive.

Downloads

There is no desktop application to download yet.

The code behind this page is published for developers to build on: play198x-core on crates.io is the Rust engine that decodes and plays this material, and @play198x/web on npm is the WebAssembly build running this page. Neither ships a standalone application.