Emulation . . .

[DrewPee]

Hello again guys (and gals),

Has anybody started doing any sort of emulators in Free Basic yet?
Im a nut when it comes to emulation, anybody else interested in this?

Regards
DrewPee

[Jim]

There's a VB ZX Spectrum emulator out there (vbspec) which has source that might be persuaded to compile.
I wrote my own speccy emulator in C - my target for that was to automatically convert speccy games to PC games though.  Another one for the back-burner

Jim

[DrewPee]

Jim
I have looked a VBSpec - it was very good actually - just need to find the source again. I have it somewhere.
How far did you get with your Speccy emulator in C?

DrewPee

[Shockwave]

That would be a cool project, to actually write something like a Spectrum emulator that properly worked and code a demo on the emulator but there must be dozens of speccy emulators. It might be a little more unusual to emulate something prehistoric like a Commodore Pet and try and make a game or demo on that, hehe. Probably been done though.

[ninogenio]

ive been thinking about porting a nes emulator possibly nester.not sure if id be able to or not but ive been looking at some sorces and dont see why they wouldnt be portible.

[Jim]

http://www.muhi.org/vbspec/

How far did you get with your Speccy emulator in C?

It emulates anything from a 16K to +3 spectrum, cycle exact.  Has sound and TZX tapes.  Seems to struggle with speedlock tapes though, so I suspect I'm not exactly exact...It also has a debugger, disassembler, code coverage/data coverage analysis.  So for instance, if the game is sat at a title screen playing music, you can see the memory map being filled in yellow where the code is executing and red where data is being read from, ie. you can rip that player and data out fairly easily then.  The idea was to automatically mark data sections into C code and transform the Z80 function into C code and be able to compile run it on a PC, obviously with some emulation support for sound and graphics.
There are literally dozens of speccy emulators out there which are way better than this one, though none of them are open source - I intended to release mine as Public Domain, but it's in a total mess right now.

Jim