CanAce

A Jupiter ACE emulator.

The Jupiter ACE

The Jupiter ACE was designed by Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers who had previously been on the design team for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It was released in 1982 and stood out from the crowd because of the bold decision to use Forth instead of Basic as its programming language. Forth was much better suited to the small memory and low processing power of early microcomputers and allowed users of the Ace to do a lot more with the hardware.

Origins of CanAce

CanAce is derived from xAce which was written by Edward Patel and heavily modified by Lawrence Woodman. This was in turn based on a ZX81 emulator written by Russell Marks, called: xz81, which was based on Ian Collier's ZX Spectrum emulator: xz80.

Requirements

• A C/C++ compiler (Currently tested with gcc and g++)
• Tcl/Tk 8.5+ and development files
• xdgbasedir Tcl module (Available on github: xdgbasedir_tcl)
• SDL Library and development files
• CMake 2.8+ (To compile)

Compiling and Running

CanAce is designed to be run under Unix and has been most thoroughly tested on Linux.

From the root directory of the repository, the directory this file is in, create the Makefiles:

$ cmake .

Then compile the project:

$ make

To install the executable and the ROM to a sensible location run the following as root:

$ make install

You can now run CanAce:

$ canace

Special ACE keys

To make the emulator easier to use the following keys are mapped:

F1     - Delete Line
F4     - Inverse Video
F9     - Graphics
F12    - Reset
Esc    - Break

Loading/Saving External Files

You can attach a tape by clicking on the 'Attach Tape' button. Once done, from that point any loading or saving is done to the selected file.

It is important to note that when you save, the rest of the file is truncated.

Spooling

You can spool text into the emulator from an external file by clicking on the 'Spool from File' button.

Alternatively you can use the -s command line switch e.g.

$ ./canace -s spool.file

or to spool more quickly, use -S e.g.

$ ./canace -S spool.file

The host keyboard response is turned off during spooling to avoid corruption.

The ROM

The distribution includes a copy of the Jupiter ACE ROM image and a copy of an email from Boldfield Computing which sheds light on the legal position of distributing the ROM with the emulator: boldcomp.email.txt.

Useful Links

• The CanAce Development Google Group. Where you can take part in discussing and shaping the direction of CanAce.
• The Jupiter Ace Resource Site is highly recommended. You will find lots of information about the ACE, in addition to an active forum and a great software archive (most of the .TAP files work with CanAce).

Credits

• Steven Vickers and Richard Altwasser
• Edward Patel
• Russell Marks
• Ian Collier

Contributions

Contributions to CanAce are welcome. Please make a pull request to the repo on github. You will also find that there is a growing testsuite in tests/.

Contact

CanAce was created by Lawrence Woodman who can be contacted by email at lwoodman@vlifesystems.com.

Licence

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.