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Posted By

IstvanV
on 2006-12-25
17:10:12
 New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I am working on an emulator that is designed to support multiple types of 8-bit
machines, including the Commodore Plus/4. It has a GPL license, and should
be portable to multiple platforms. While it is probably of no interest to users yet,
as important parts like the GUI are still to be done, but the basic hardware is
already there, and the accuracy of the emulation is relatively good. If you have
some knowledge of C++, and are interested in the project (or maybe would like
to contribute), the current CVS sources can be viewed here:
http://ep128emu.cvs.sourceforge.net/ep128emu/ep128emu2/

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2006-12-29
08:25:01
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Update: the current sources can be downloaded with this command:
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@ep128emu.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ep128emu checkout -r ep128emu2-2006_12_29-cpp -P ep128emu2

Posted By

Csabo
on 2006-12-29
09:41:39
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Just out of curiosity: have you heard of VICE? It sounds exactly like what you are describing: it supports multiple 8-bit machines, including the Plus/4, it's multi-platform, and it's GPL.

If you have heard of it, what would be the differences in your emu? Why do you think it's a good idea to start something like this from scratch instead of contributing to a large, mature project?

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2006-12-29
11:15:21
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I am aware of VICE, and it is a fairly good emulator in general, although the TED emulation in it does not seem to be as complete and accurate as in Yape, which, however, only runs on Windows, and as far as I know is not free software either as of the current version. I did intend to contribute to VICE a few years ago, but the VICE developers did not seem to be interested in the idea, and appeared to prefer implementing Plus/4 emulation on their own. Also, I do not limit the scope of emulation to Commodore machines. While it may be difficult to create an emulator that is as feature-complete and efficient in general as VICE, my code seems to already reproduce the behavior of the TED chip better in some areas (I understand that VICE is originally and mainly a C64/128 emulator, though). So, I thought it may be worth mentioning, even if this early version is not yet ready for most users.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2006-12-29
12:59:15
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Cool then, thanks for the info, and good luck with your project.

Posted By

Gaia
on 2007-01-08
16:32:23
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I have had a look at the CVS source and it indeed looks much more compatible than the first version from 2004 (?) to a great deal because you had made it cycle based. BTW, why a plus/4 emulator? What's your relation to the plus/4? Do you still own one?

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-01-09
05:08:29
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Yes, I do have a Plus/4 - in fact, it is the first machine I used, although it is only a basic configuration.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-01-14
19:20:34
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
The current emulator sources are not really a new version of the one from 2003/2004, though, but rather written from scratch.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-08
18:35:29
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Here is a package that includes Win32 binaries and the source code:
http://www.sharemation.com/IstvanV/ep128emu2_20070208.zip
This alpha version is mostly functional, although a few GUI features are
not implemented yet, and there is no floppy emulation for the Plus/4. It
does already have a fairly complete CPU and TED implementation, as
well as tape, PRG loading and saving, snapshots, recording and playing
keyboard events, and SID emulation using reSID.

Posted By

Luca
on 2007-02-09
02:40:39
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Argh! It breaks at the opening on this PC. I'll try at home too...

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-09
12:55:54
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
How did it break ? Did you get some Windows error message, or the program started up,
but the display was blank ? If the latter, then you just need to set up the configuration, like
selecting the ROM images and loading the keyboard map (these should eventually be
done by an installer, though).

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-09
19:01:20
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
There is an updated version now that, among other changes, fixes a bug in timer
emulation:
http://www.sharemation.com/IstvanV/ep128emu2_20070209.zip
By the way, the program should be started with the -plus4 command line option to
emulate a Plus/4. You can also use -no-opengl to disable the use of OpenGL for
video output if that does not work for some reason. When running the first time,
the keyboard map should be initialized by loading the configuration file p4_keys.cfg,
and ROM images should be set up in Machine/Configure.../Memory:
00 p4_basic.rom
01 p4kernal.rom
02 3plus1lo.rom (optional)
03 3plus1hi.rom (optional)
06 p4fileio.rom (optional)

Posted By

MasK
on 2007-02-15
12:11:47
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Hmm.---the emulator crashes on my XP too...I can't understand,there is only an XP error window "application encountered an error,and need to close".I can't figure out,what's the matter.
It seems like,XP "feels" some strange error (at adress 00? so what..?!?) in ep128emu.exe.
When launching the application from command promt or "run",emulator window is coming in,but after short time(1...1,5 sec) it's totaly crashes.
I tried many command line options,restarted my computer,stopped my background aplications....but nothing changed,the serious crash remain constant.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-15
13:36:58
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
This is really odd, as it does run for me (under Windows 2000, though), and earlier non-GUI builds were reported to work by others. What type of CPU do you have ? The .exe was compiled for the Pentium |||, so it may very well crash on older CPUs that do not have some instructions (e.g. SSE). Alternatively, it may be possible that hyperthreading or a dual core CPU causes problems (should not happen, but I cannot test it - having only an Athlon64 - so I cannot be sure); that could be tested by setting the CPU affinity for the .exe so that it will only run on only one core.

Posted By

MasK
on 2007-02-15
16:36:11
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
The problem is already solved,the wrong DirectX driver caused that...i don't know why.
It's working for now,only with "-no-opengl" option,but i'm happy with that..
I have an old Pentium3 CPU,only with 1GHz clock happy
Maybe the long time before intalled,instable SP1 XP is the core of the problem...I have to get some SP2 at least,and reinstall my computer.
Btw I like your emulator,nice work..It will emulate all common commodore computer,like vice?
Maybe other Z80 based computers will be parts of your project? (like HTZ80 or Sinclair,etc)

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-15
19:32:45
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I only have the machines that are already emulated, but if others join the project, it may indeed be possible to add some more types of machine. By the way, I have uploaded a new build (it is only the .exe file, so you still need the other files from ep128emu2_20070209.zip):
http://www.sharemation.com/IstvanV/ep128emu.exe.zip
This has more GUI functionality implemented (there is a simple debugger now), new Plus/4 colors which may or may not look better, support for the mode when bit 7 of $FF06 is set, and some minor fixes and improvements.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-15
22:13:48
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I finally took a look. I understand that it's alpha, but I guess the reason you are pushing it is to get feedback, so here it comes:
- Make running the emu in Plus/4 mode a 1-click affair. I don't care if you write batch files or create some project file that include all the necessary setting, but as of now it takes an awful lot of work just to get it running. I also want to be able to associate it with PRG files, so that I can right-click any program I want and have an "Open with ep128emu2" option.
- Does every file browsing dialog have to start from the root? I think it's safe to assume that we will plop this thing into our Plus/4 folder. It could start from the "current" folder.
- What's with the non-standard browsing window? A folder up icon is really missing. What's the preview for? Doesn't seem to preview anything.
- A suggestion: follow YAPE's shortcut keys. I think it's safe to say that the Plus/4 crown is used to pressing F8 to load a file and F11 to reset, etc. Or ALT+W to toggle full speed, that one works in VICE too.

That was the nice part. Here comes the conspiracy-theory part. I've been supporting YAPE for a long time, and had access to the source as well, so I have a pretty good idea of what went into developing it. I have a folder full of programs that are/were problematic on YAPE, I use this for regression testing of the new versions. (Mind you, other emulators still can't even touch these!) Most of these ran surprisingly well on your emulator. So I'm suspicious: how did you get your emulation so good so quick? Did you disassemble YAPE or something?

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-16
05:40:25
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Creating Start Menu icons will be the job of the Win32 installer (which I will probably implement using the free Nullsoft install system). So you will have the four possible modes (EP/P4 in software/OpenGL mode) as separate icons. Same for associating .prg files (although it may be tricky to get loading those from the command line working without ugly hacks). The ROM images will still be an issue, however, as those are not GPL, and will probably be included in a separate package, and not in the main SourceForge file releases.

The file browse dialogs only start from "My Computer" the first time, since the directories are remembered, and saved on exit. However, directories for different purposes (e.g. tape images, .prg files, snapshots, etc.) are remembered separately, so initially it may seem as if file browsing always starts from "My Computer" - but the next time you open a file of the same type, it will use the last directory, even after quitting the emulator.

I use a cross-platform GUI toolkit, that is why the file browse dialogs look different from native WIndows ones. I may try adding platform specific code to use the native dialog on Win32, though.

Using an exact copy of YAPE shortcut keys may be a problem, because some of those keys are actually used by other machines (the Enterprise 128 does have 8 function keys, as well as an Alt key - so I am left with F9 to F12, as well as these combined with Shift or Control. However, I may consider swapping F11 and F12, as I find it very annoying that when I try to reset YAPE (used to my own keyboard layout) it quits instead without asking.

As of your last qustion: no, I did not disassemble YAPE, or use any part of it. Anyway, reverse engineering a large Win32 executable is not necessarily easier (and definitely not as fun) than figuring out the real hardware; there is also no guarantee at all that YAPE's solutions are correct, making that option even less worth considering. I did have a look at the old open source SDL version, but only as a reference to see how it compares to my own (usually quite different) solutions, and not taking any actual source code - it is very old anyway, and does not implement most of the really tricky aspects of the hardware. Although, it may be possible that I will use the high level (IEC based) floppy emulation from the old GPL version, but if I do so, the author would be credited in the documentation.
In fact, it may make more sense to worry about code being copied not from, but to the closed source version of YAPE, which, while a violation of the GPL, would be difficult to prove not having access to the source code. But I do not accuse others without a good reason, and have more interest in working on and improving my own code.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-16
09:19:23
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Well, then you are a pretty good programmer indeed! I'm amazed that your emulator is able to emulate FLIs that quickly, good for you. I was secretly hoping you might say something like "I have a documentation on all the inner workings of the TED" or something.

I don't know what's your intended audience for this emulator, I thought I would be a pretty typical Plus/4 user for it. I understand most of your points as a developer, but as a user: I just don't care. If it doesn't work the way I want it to work, I just won't use it.

Again, thanks for the info, and good luck with your project.

Posted By

TLC
on 2007-02-18
17:14:58
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Saying the same thing that you did, Csabo, just with different words: István's emu came close to Yape's emulation accuracy just in 2 months, starting from scratch. (I'd add that his emu is, finally, an opensource project, and is already based on libraries that exist for several platforms so that porting the emu is easier, but this is irrelevant to what I'm trying to explain).

I really do appreciate and like Attila's work (I myself feel proud of having had the opportunity to help him in some details... besides the fact that I consider him a good friend of mine), but I still feel that respect is respect, and feel it strange how badly István's work is received, at least, compared to a, say, very important TLT digi (with all due respect also).

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-19
09:07:55
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Badly received? Could you please elaborate on that?

From what I see a bunch of us tried it, gave him feedback, bug reports, requests, wished him good luck... What else would you like us to do?

Posted By

Luca
on 2007-02-19
09:27:48
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
For example I tried several times to run it, with no success at all

Posted By

TLC
on 2007-02-20
10:44:24
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Csabo: I felt difference between the reception ("welcome-ness") of some basic things appearing here in p4w, as compared to their supposed real importance, in relation to the reception of István's work, as compared to its supposed importance. I felt this hmmm... unbalanced at the first place, and second, I also slightly felt a commonly assumed use to become questioned (or possibly get transparent, in other words).

Things usually receive positive feedbacks here; as I understand, because of a solidarity of some sort, some kind of encouraging (which, as I understand, should be a consequence of the idea that if someone does some steps concerning the Plus/4, he should be regarded positively... with which I tend to agree to some extent... even though this breaks the implied relation of feedback and value).

I noticed that the reception of István's work was, IMHO, not especially encouraging. I don't mean the first comments here (back then, it was unpredictable if there's real potential in this project, or is just another piece of fluff), or the questions concerning the origin of the code (clear questions are the simplest...)... But putting these aside, I still don't especially feel a devoted positive mood (not even after the emu admittedly turned out to be something valuable... remember the comment with the fairly well running stuffs from the bin of known problematic products)... which might not be a problem itself, it's just inconsistent with the above rule or phenomenon. I might have as well asked if feedback was really a consequence of the so-called "Plus/4 family" solidarity, or this assumption should be wrong... or this case is simply an exception to the rule... or whatever... but no other implications (I didn't want anyone explicitely to change anything, I just wanted to express what I noticed for anyone's own consideration).

Luca: unfortunately, I haven't tried the Windows port (I rarely boot up DOS or Windows nowadays). I just compiled the source and tested it under Linux. It clearly looks like being in an early stage (it's just less than three months old), it feels rough here and there / clearly needs polishing (and still lacks drive emulation, for example). On the other hand, it's developing, now has an useable GUI, and it already emulates the CPU and the TED quite well. I wouldn't state that it's up to Yape ATM, especially not for Windows users (Yape, besides its wide range of emulated devices, got also well polished during its lifetime), but considering its way so far and its current capabilities, it looks promising.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-20
12:05:34
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Actually, there is already some drive emulation, but it only implements the 1581. Also, I did add support for loading a .prg file on startup, as requested. Unfortunately, I can reproduce neither the Windows crashes, nor the Linux audio stability problems you have encountered, so I do not know how to fix those yet.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-20
12:06:22
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Well said. I guess you are right and I agree with most of your points. I think it comes down to interest (and "supposed importance"): I'm personally not that interested in yet another Plus/4 emulator (hee-hee wink), since my requirements are so nicely met with YAPE. I didn't think that much about users of other OSes.

Put yourself in our shoes (average Plus/4 scene member, running Windows and YAPE): we tried it, it doesn't work that well yet. At the current stage it's not something to get super excited about. Good luck with this project, may it get better, faster, more stable. But for this project to be truly successful, it will need to have a feature big enough for us to make the switch. Or, perhaps it will have to be just good enough (i.e. not super accurate), but then blazing fast. Then it would have a nice niche market, especially for people with slower CPUs.

It's nothing personal against the creator or anything like that. Did you see how excited the scene got at the mention of a SID card?

My final point: I'm not that worried or surprised that the feedback is "not especially encouraging". I'm worried (but again not surprised) about the lack of feedback and encouragement for REAL Plus/4 projects, such as SVS's BalSys. But that's a different story. If we go down this line, very soon we will be asking ourselves: what does the scene need, what are we still interested in. I'm a bit afraid about those questions, because they answers might be "not much". And I would really like to see our scene grow and prosper.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-20
12:08:32
 Re: support for loading a .prg file on startup
Nice! I will give it a try tonight. This should make it easier for me to run through the problematic programs, if I find anything, I'll let you know.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-20
19:03:42
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
If you want to try out the latest version, I have now updated the ep128emu.exe.zip file. As usual, you still need the other files from the older full package, as well as the 1581 ROM if you want to use that. In the machine configuration, load the first 16 kilobytes to ROM 30, and the second 16 kilobytes to ROM 31. Then you can add D81 image(s) in the floppy configuration dialog (unit 8 is A, etc.; the geometry parameters are ignored, because a D81 is assumed to always have 80 cylinders, 2 sides, and 10 sectors per track). The image file may also be \\.\A: to access a disk directly - this may or may not work in practice.
A PRG file can be loaded on startup with the -prg command line option.
Note: some configuration parameters are now interpreted differently, so the speed of the emulated machine may not be correct if there is an old configuration file - set CPU frequency to 1 (this is a multiplier, not a Hz value), and video clock frequency to 17734475 (PAL) or 14318180 (NTSC).

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-20
21:48:18
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Only found one so far: writing to the sideborder (e.g. a la Chaos). I have a bunch of D64 files in there that I cannot yet test. My little collection is not an exhaustive list though, there may be other demos/games that do tricky things, but generally, your emulation is already in very good shape.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-21
05:28:55
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I do know about possible problems related to writing to the horizontal position register (FF1E) - this area is not extensively tested yet, and the effects can be really strange. But I have just made some improvements yesterday, so the demo that now looks like this: http://www.sharemation.com/IstvanV/demo2.jpg was previously completely wrong (http://www.sharemation.com/IstvanV/demo1.jpg). It still does not turn on the borders, and I do not yet understand if it should then why, given that it apparently skips the cycle where the right border normally starts. Are there other similar "problematic" programs ?

Posted By

BushRat
on 2007-02-21
14:01:59
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
IstvanV.... Good for you! I know what it is like to dive into a project, when there are already similar apps out there. I spent 10 years writing to the Plus/4 and see very few of the machine language tookits, that resulted, in use at all. Anyone that is actively writing to the Plus/4, at this late date, should be encouraged and praised... reguardless of the project. Keep up the good work Boy!!

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-22
12:03:31
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Interestingly, it seems that the code used in the above mentioned demo does not turn on the sideborders at all on the real machine either (it does in YAPE), although what is displayed in place of the borders is not exactly the same.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-22
12:38:15
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Like you said, the $FF1E stuff is still largely unexplored/undocumented. Instead of worrying about that, how would you feel about porting your emulator to the Palm? Neither VICE not YAPE is header in that direction. I have a Palm, and having a Plus/4 emulator for the Palm is something I would be extremely interested in.

Check 5 Magics, MC Demo, Graffiti Is Born for more weird effects that would probably be tough to emulate.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-22
17:29:31
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I do not have a Palm, nor have experience in developing for it, so I probably cannot port it myself. However, the emulation engine could be used as a platform independent library, independently from the UI and the video/audio drivers, allowing others to make ports to systems that are fast enough for running it, or write new frontends.
Anyway, thaks for reporting programs that do not work correctly. So far, I found the cause of the display problem in the "graffiti" demo (an internal TED register is reset to zero at the wrong time). I will also have a look at the others: one seems to have the already known sideborder trick issues (incidentally, it looks the same in YAPE), but demos that depend on the behavior of television with unusual sync input can be difficult to deal with.

Posted By

Gaia
on 2007-02-22
18:07:05
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Csabo: I heard the Palm did not have a proper C++ compiler. Besides, this new emulator's engine is probably way too much for the meager processor of a Palm. It's maxing out not much above 100% on my 3 GHz P4 (or using >50% cpu when idling on 100%). But maybe it is just because it is compiled without optimizations, I dunno.

Istvan, you'd better check out that demo again as it does turn on the sideborders on the real iron (like Yape)...

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-22
18:55:00
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Is it sure ? It did not for me, although I did not test the demo itself, only the relevant code fragments, because I have no floppy drive for the real machine, and transferring the whole program would have been more problematic. Nevertheless, the code that was actually tested was exatcly the same on the real machine, YAPE, and ep128emu, and only YAPE turned on the sideborders.

The CPU usage on the P4 looks suspicious (assuming that you did not use high settings and/or multiple floppy drives). I have around 20% on my Athlon64 3200+ (2 GHz) without floppy or SID emulation and low texture resolution (i.e. quality 1, which is sufficient for the Plus/4 since it has only 384 pixels of horizontal resolution), but when adding one 1581 drive, enabling reSID, and using high quality sample rate conversion for sound output, it is slightly less than 50% (well, you may be right if that is what you have tested). It is true however that the software video driver can use a lot of CPU time when used at high resolutions, so using OpenGL is recommended if that works well.

Posted By

Gaia
on 2007-02-22
19:27:46
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
You could be right, it's showing an emptiness which is not border coloured (I only looked at the emptiness). Gonna have a look at it later.

As for the speed: it might be suspicious, but it also feels slow and the video is jumpy and jerky. All this without drive or SID, if I turn on the latter, CPU consumption goes up to ~80%.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-22
19:42:25
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Don't know much about Palm programming either, but the C64 emulator that I have for it runs very nicely at 100%, and reaches over 300% speed on warp. Emulates a lot of stuff correctly. So it sounds like still no hope for a Plus/4 emulator on the Palm

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-22
20:02:42
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
What settings did you use ? Perhaps the jumpy video can be improved somehow; although it seems to be worse on Windows, I can still get it quite usable.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2007-02-22
21:18:40
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
The video is jumpy for me too, I used whatever the default settings were. I didn't mention it since it's alpha. I also get a weird warning: "CTASIO Warning: The Creative ASIO devices have changed. You may need to restart this program before using Creative ASIO devices." exactly 3 times every time I run the emulator. I've never seen this message come up otherwise on my machine, and doesn't seem to affect anything either.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-23
05:40:06
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
The ASIO warning looks like a PortAudio issue. I should probably try building a new PortAudio DLL from up to date sources to see if that fixes the problem, or just not compile in ASIO support. For improving the responsiveness, try increasing the "hardware buffers" parameter in the sound configuration dialog, and reducing "latency" - getting it as low as possible while still having stable audio output. With the MME wave mapper output (which is normally the first device listed and is the default), I can use 16 buffers and a latency of 50 ms without problems. If you are using OpenGL video, setting "display quality" to 1 is recommended, as the default of 2 uses a 768x288 texture size which is not needed for Plus/4 emulation; also worth experimenting with is the double buffering option.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-02-28
15:21:59
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I was able to make some improvements to the "problematic" programs in the CVS sources. The "graffiti" demo does look better now, and the "five magics" sideborder trick is also somewhat closer to working - it does count from 1 to 42 (rather than from 2 and repeating the last number like before), but the rest of the display below that is still shifted to the left by one character. The other extended sideborder demo now displays background color (like the real machine seems to do) where it had garbage before.
As requested, I have also changed the keyboard layout to be closer to that of YAPE. Now, the next main issue to be solved is 1541 emulation, as the lack of that is indeed a major disadvantage.

Posted By

Crown
on 2007-02-28
18:32:32
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
Palm is pretty much dead, they haven't innovated in a long time now. Their last version of the PalmOS was very flawed, and the way they choose to deal with backwards compatibility was absolutely nonsense. Old devices were 68k based and even the new (pretty old now) ARM based devices are emulating 68k most of the time, and writing native ARM code was really complicated the last time I checked. There was no true multithreading, and there are serious limits on the size of memory an application can allocate continously. They also stopped developing the PalmOS, and bought some Chinese company which in theory works on a Linux based OS incorporating the Palm UI. But this was news like a year and a half ago, and nothing came out of that yet.

No wonder they started shipping devices based on Windows Mobile.

Given that the PDA and Smartphone market is pretty much dominated by Windows Mobile now, and the only interesting newcomer is the IPhone, Palm will have a really hard time, to recapture the imagination of the people, and raise interest for development.

Posted By

IstvanV
on 2007-03-07
07:47:28
 Re: New emulator with Plus/4 support is developed
I am getting closer to releasing a first beta version now: there is a preliminary 1541 emulation (mostly works, but could be more robust, particularly regarding compatibility with fast loaders), and an NSIS based Windows installer is being made, which can already create Start Menu shortcuts, associate .prg files with the emulator, download and install ROM images from an external web site, and automatically generate configuration files so the user does not need to manually set up the keyboard map, ROM images, etc., and the emulator can be used "out of the box". There are some minor TED compatibility improvements as well. One annoying issue that is still to be solved is video updates not being as smooth on Windows as on Linux.



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