zesarux VS lighthouse-of-doom

Not 100% sure, but I suggest you to take a look at ZEsarUX.

There are tons of emulators, FUSE being probably the most popular, but I'm partial to ZEsarUX as it just works out of the box with no config required and its smart load is pretty accurate, you can download it from here, just grab the windows zip, extract it and launch it.

Alas I'm a Windows dunce. I really know nothing about it. The Windows emulators I've see mentioned recently in the sort of emulator circles I frequent are Retro Virtual Machine and ZeSarUX but both of them are quite different from my ideal image of an emulator, having non-standard UIs and being very upfront about being products of their own. In my ideal world an emulator would just make my computer Spectrum compatible, so all my Spectrum software sits in my applications folder, or on my dock, or wherever else I launch software from, and clicking it launches it just like clicking on any other piece of software.

Otherwise, both ZeSarUX and Retro Virtual Machine tend to get great reviews but both have weird UIs. In the former case it's all drawn Spectrum-style and big on menus you scroll through, in the latter it's skeuomorphism-a-gogo and it has a — to me — fairly unintuitive project-oriented library for running software.

Check also https://github.com/chernandezba/zesarux