Category: Emulator
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Sound – Getting it perfect…
Like most games, Ultimate’s games only do three things: Emulating the graphics was largely trivial, but the sound was far more problematic. To make sounds on the ZX Spectrum, the developer would literally just switch the power to the internal speaker very quickly, on and off. There were no sound samples per se and all…
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Apptastic idea….
So it appears we’ve now gone full circle, the app coding phenomenon for the smart phones and tablets now perfectly mimics what happened 30 years ago I guess in 2013, we are at the 90’s point in the gaming world. The crossover point between hobbyist/small studios to the mega game studios. I couldn’t help but…
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Finishing off the emulator
All of the Windows Phone 7 devices, only one had a hardware keyboard. The software keyboard was not practical. The screen was too small to include the game and control buttons together. I certainly didn’t want to taint the games by putting button overlays on top of the game, no matter how transparent they were.…
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Testing the emulator
Boy was this hard, testing took far longer than writing the code and debugging was a major pain… Writing an emulator is quite different from coding normal applications. Mainly because with an emulator you don’t get to see it working until it’s completely finished. There is no watching it as it gradually matures. Unit tests…
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Removing the Sinclair ROM from the emulator
The Spectrum has a 16K ROM. The ROM being the primitive operating system (monitor) for the computer, one of the first tasks was to reverse engineer it so a complete understanding of the machine could be gleaned. The exercise was largely trivial as it was well documented, as shown here in The Complete Spectrum ROM…
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Game Harness vs Spectrum Emulator
When I was looking to implement the emulator, I decided early on to move away from creating a ZX Spectrum emulator that could play any Spectrum game. Instead the idea was to produce a Game Harness that could bring the best qualities of these 30 year old games onto a modern platform without the handicap…
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Starting the Z80 Emulator…
Other than being hugely tedious coding up roughly 1,792 op codes it was fairly simple (the op code DAA was fun though!) to write the emulator, the only resources I needed were: I had used Zaks as my main reference but in hindsight I should have started with Sean Young’s document, this document I found…