Sinclair Spectrum Allstars: Volume 3

The Good
The good part of this product is that there it contains thirty games, these are in .tap and .tzx format and so should work in most Spectrum emulators. That's about it.

The Bad
1. This is not an expansion pack
It says on the front of the inlay that this is an expansion pack, consequently I had expected additional games would be added top those installed in Sinclair Spectrum Allstars: Volume 1. This is not the case. The setup process installs a new 'stand alone' emulator, the game ROMs are not added to Volume 1's library and must be copied to the player's game library manually, or of course they can be played direct from the CD. The gamer can play new games via the emulator supplied with Volume 1 by loading the ROM directly, playing them through Volume 1's menu system will be difficult because that involves editing the associated scripting files and linking the ROM to some game art which isn't available in this product.

1. This product wrecked my machine!
   First a bit of background. I have a Windows 98 machine. It works just fine but it is slow, it's in another room and it takes some setting up 'coz the cables tend to get redeployed to other projects. As a result I tend to play 98% of WIN98 games on a virtual machine. I have had no problem with this approach for years, I played Sinclair Spectrum Allstars: Volume 1 this way, but Volume 3 caused me problems.
   I ran the supplied setup process to install the new emulator and this forced a restart of my machine. When the virtual machine restarted I got warning messages saying that OLEAUT32.dll had gone missing. Once the machine was fully up and running the effect of the missing files made itself felt very quickly, not only would the new emulator not run - it reported another missing file, neither would Volume 1's emulator and more importantly nor would Windows Explorer. I spent a 'happy' couple of hours trying to fix this before abandoning the project and restoring the virtual drive from a backup.
   Now this could be a glitch that's specific to me and the way my machine is configured or it could be a fundamental problem with the install process.

2. For those who collect old Spectrum games there will be a few disappointments here, as advertised there are thirty games here but some of these were included on Volume 1 while others which carry a 2004 or 2005 copyright date are definitely not as 'retro' as expected
   
   The Bottom Line
   It is not an expansion pack and it trashed my virtual machine. On the upside though the supplied games did all play flawlessly when I used my regular Spectrum emulator ZXSPIN.

Why no screenshots? Because the game emulator just did not work and without that this is just a collection of files.