Thursday 2 April 2020

How to work it

As the github is actually just a live build tree, it's not obvious how to make it work. The executables are in the emulator directory ; they should work straight off (they're built on Windows 8.1 in Virtualbox) and they store their files in the storage directory.

Building requires SDL2, Python and command line Zip, and either gcc or mingw. On Windows I recommend chocolatey which does all of them and sets them up, except SDL2 which you can download (the mingw development one), extract it and put the x64 directory in C:\ renamed SDL2.

You don't need to do this to run it. It should just run. If not, let me know :)

When you run it what happens depends on what I was working on. If there's a program "autoexec.prg" in storage it auto runs this. At the time of writing it shows two overlapping rectangles in purple.

If it's running a program and doesn't seem to stop (you can tell when it's stopped by the flashing cursor) then either press Ctrl+Space to break it, or reset it while holding shift down.

Reset is Ctrl+Escape on the hardware, and F1 on the emulator. This will boot it in normal mode displaying Basic/Kernel versions and playing its startup beep, half inched from my much loved BBC Micro.

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