This is a minimalistic Commodore VIC-20 emulator library for Linux with framebuffer device. Other Unices have not been tested, yet.
You can either use shadowVIC on low–performance devices as a replacement for other emulators, which are too slow, or to basically retain the original program cores and upgrading them with better graphics and sound.
You can help out with these things or by telling how to implement them (please!):
- Keyboard emulation that stops BASIC from hanging.
- 6560/6561 reverse mode.
- Basic VIA interrupts.
- Sven Michael Klose pixel@hugbox.org
- Eric Hilaire
- Robert Hurst
shadowVIC uses the GNU autotools to get built and installed. Accordingly, you need to have autoconf and automake installed.
sudo aptitude install automake autoconf libtool
libtoolize
autoreconf -i
automake --add-missing
./configure
make
To get maximum performance out of shadowVIC with gcc, you should specifiy the following options:
./configure CFLAGS="-O3 -flto"
shadowVIC disassembles the CPU instructions it executes, if you configure it like this:
./configure CPPFLAGS="-DDISASSEMBLE"
Dumping the VIC 6560/6561 settings on each screen update might also be essential:
./configure CPPFLAGS="-DDISASSEMBLE -DDEBUG_VIC"
After building shadowVIC you can install it by typing:
sudo make install
By default the shared and static libraries, headers and binaries are installed to /usr/local. The binaries installed are:
- picovic which is shadowVIC trying to boot BASIC,
- pulse, a horizontally scrolling shoot-them-up which you can play with a joystick.
Please note that you might have to run shadowVIC programs as root for them to be able to access the framebuffer device. If you're wondering why you don't see anything: you have to switch to the console on which the framebuffer is displayed. Most likely that is done by pressing Ctrl, Alt and some function key.
shadowVIC emulates:
- 6502 CPU without undocumented instructions
- most basic 6560/6561 graphics display
- VIA joystick status
It emulates absolutely nothing else. No keyboard, no sound, nothing.
The high bits of this counter are incremented every 23 instructions as a source of pseudo–random numbers and to keep loops that wait for certain values from blocking.
The screen is updated every bunch of instructions or if an illegal instruction tells the emulator to do so. That way you can avoid slowdowns. See the next section for that.
The illegal opcode $22 (which would jam the CPU) signals an emulator call. It is followed by a byte ID and optional parameters.
$22 $00 ASCIZ-string accu x y
First, the ASCIIZ string is printed to the console. Then, the accumulater and X and Y registers are compared with the parameters provided and the emulator is halted if they don't match.
$22 $01
Exits the emulator. Actually makes functions vic20_run()/vic20_emulate() return.
$22 $02
Makes the emulator update the display and waits to sync the output with the frames per second specified.
$22 $03 <from address> <to address>
Dumps the specified address range like hexdump(1).
The debugger is invoked via Ctrl+C. It is under construction and can only exit shadowVIC or print memory dumps. Enter 'h' in the debugger to get a command overview.