OSCA Emulator more up-to-date than retro

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Spent some time today modifying the I/O mapping of the OSCA emulator to bring it fully up-to-date with the latest release (v6.64 at the time of writing this).

In practical terms, this brings in bankable lower 32k of RAM and re-mappable video RAM addressing. On the main OSCA emulator page, the binary and source download links have both been updated to point to the latest revision (0.4 as of this writing). As they are full archives, take care not to overwrite any modified disk image files!! I also took the opportunity to correct the minor typo in the supplied config file so it should boot without any issues now “out-of-the-box” (Thanks to Niallquinn, Phil and Enzo for pointing this out)

In terms of some of the other newer features of OSCA (video support mostly – 8×8 tilemap mode, wide chunky pixels etc.), this functionality has not yet been incorporated, but is next on the list!

OSCA v6.64 booted in the emulator

Obligatory screengrab above shows 6.64 successfully booted in the emulator. On a side-issue, this now means that Daniel’s awesome loopback demo now shows the intro screen, but it then goes into a loop waiting for something… not sure what yet!

DT

V6Z80P – What’s that noise?

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I’ve uploaded a patched version of the V6Z80P OSCA emulator to the respective page. This patched version should just be unpacked over the top of the existing executable.

The major change with this version is the addition of (working!) Audio support – So now you can enjoy the MOD and PT3 players running under FLOS. I’ve made the output discretely stereo on each channel rather than fully left-or-right as it would be on the real hardware. There may well be issues with the Audio playback, but “it works for me pretty much(tm)”. The only major item left to do with Audio (besides the inevitable bug-fixing) is to add a linear resampler mode to smooth out the output.

I’ve also re-vamped the way that the display is updated. It isn’t the best implementation in all fairness, but that’s likely to be the next point of attention (in particular to add the sorely-lacking Tilemap mode and sprites). Also, the performance isn’t all that great, sadly: You may want to click the Options menu and disable both the video smoothing and auto-throttling (and drag that throttle bar way up!). Once the hardware is largely all implemented, I will revamp the timing mechanism used in the emulator (time permitting) to improve performance, especially when multiple cores/cpus are used.

Anyway – progress is progress, so I’m reasonably happy to have had some time to revisit the emulator after such a long hiatus.

DT

Sharper than the average emulator?

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OK, OK, so this isn’t something that’s likely to float the boat of many but the hardest of hard-core emulator fans, but I’ve finally found a little time to complete a page for my Sharp MZ-80B Emulator.

I lost the original page long ago, but the Internet Archive was kind enough to at least recover a little of my lost endeavours, and fortunately I managed to find the actual code to upload.

In fairness, the emulator is now pretty much discontinued, so is presented here just for posterity purposes.

DT