R-Type was published in 1988 by Electric Dreams Software for the ZX Spectrum 48k, and they made an excellent job with it. However, due to the hardware and memory limitations, the game was released without music, which was a big part of its frantic gameplay.
This weekend, a new mod for the classic game was released trying to close the gap between the modest Speccy version and the fully-loaded arcade one. Goodboy & Tiboh managed to add music to all levels, from on the MSX port, and also you can select the AY sound effects from the CPC version instead of the original ones. There is also support for Kempston mouse and a cheat mode.
The game is mighty impressive for being a ZX Spectrum 48k game, but it was just a shame to release such a brilliant piece of coding without support for the AY chip in the 128k machines. The game was also only released on tape, there was no +3 disc version, and all re-releases was also on tape.
You can check the game in action in the video below.
How to run it?
To run the game on emulators, you have to select a Russian clone or, in the case of Fuse, I managed to play the game selecting Scorpion ZX 256 after downloading the 256s-X.rom (X correspond to numbers 0 to 3) ROMs from the project github repository.
Source: Planeta Sinclar
Download: R-Type 128K