An Italian card game for the 48K ZX Spectrum

SCOPA

The classic Neapolitan card game Scopa, hand-written in pure Z80 machine code for an unmodified 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum. One player against a genuinely strong AI, the full Napoletane deck, match to eleven.

In memory of a friend’s lost game —
based on an original ZX Spectrum game by Angelo Colucci.

▶  Play in your browser ⤓  Download the tape
Scopa loading screen: a Neapolitan knight on horseback holding a gold coin, with the SCOPA wordmark over the Italian tricolore

The tape loading screen — drawn pixel by pixel on the Spectrum.

Play it now

No tape, no emulator to install — the real Spectrum binary runs right here, in a JavaScript Spectrum. Press ▶, watch it load from the (virtual) tape to the title screen, then click the screen and press SPACE to start.

In play

Title screen with a fan of three Neapolitan court cards
Title screen
A hand in progress: the cyan felt, the opponent's face-down cards, the table, and your hand
A hand in progress
End-of-deal scoring screen showing Carte, Denari, Settebello, Primiera and more
Round scoring
The in-game how-to-play screen
How to play

A faithful Neapolitan deck

Every one of the forty cards is rendered in defined monochrome — crisp black linework with ordered-dither shading — traced faithfully from a real Napoletane deck. The four suits (coins, cups, swords, clubs), the settebello, and the court figures with their hand-placed suit emblems, all on a single 48 KB machine.

Five cards close up: the seven of coins, ace of cups, king of coins, knight of cups and king of clubs
The complete forty-card Neapolitan deck rendered for the ZX Spectrum
The complete forty-card deck.

What’s inside

♠

Pure Z80

100% hand-written machine code on an unmodified 48K Spectrum — no extra hardware, no 128K.

⚔

A strong opponent

The AI weighs every legal play with a tuned value function. Easy, Medium and Hard — and it counts cards on Hard. It plays fair: it never sees your hand.

🪙

Full scoring

Carte, Denari, the Settebello, Primiera, every Scopa, plus the regional Napola and palle del cane bonuses. First to eleven wins.

🎴

Authentic art

The forty Neapolitan cards, traced faithfully and rendered in defined monochrome on the Spectrum’s screen.

🃏

Optional rule

Asso piglia tutto — the ace sweeps the whole table — included as a toggle, off by default, in the Scopa d’Assi reading.

📼

Loads from tape

A silent multi-part loader boots straight to the title screen on real hardware — TZX and TAP both provided.

Download & play on real hardware

Grab a tape image for your real Spectrum or your favourite emulator (Fuse, ZEsarUX, Spectaculator…). Both load identically; the TZX also carries title, author and year metadata.

.TZX scopa.tzx Recommended · with archive metadata · ~38 KB .TAP scopa.tap Plain tape image · ~38 KB

On a real 48K Spectrum: LOAD "" and play the tape. It boots itself to the title screen.

The story

Years ago a friend, Angelo Colucci, wrote a game of Scopa for the ZX Spectrum. Its hand-drawn cards were superb — and it was lost to time.

This is a recreation, built to honour it: the Italian card game in full, written from scratch in Z80 machine code for a real 48K machine. The rules and scoring were checked against the standard Neapolitan game, the card art traced faithfully from a physical deck, and the AI tuned by tens of thousands of self-played games. It was developed and tested against real hardware on a CRT.

— Tony Gillett, 2026