This is a go at wrapping up my very much work in progress C64 emulator for the Analogue Pocket. The emulator core itself MyC64 was something that I started working on as a hobby project during summer of 2020. Sporadically over the years I have put some effort into it. Finally it is approaching some level of usefulness.
Simply unzip the MyC64-Pocket.zip (from releases) in the root directory of
the Analogue Pocket's SD card.
For legal reasons all ROMs are kept outside the FPGA bitstream distributed here. The Commodore ROMs (three for the C64 and two for the 1541) can be fetched with
wget http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/firmware/computers/c64/basic.901226-01.bin
wget http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/firmware/computers/c64/characters.901225-01.bin
wget http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/firmware/computers/c64/kernal.901227-03.bin
wget http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/firmware/drives/new/1541/1540-c000.325302-01.bin
wget http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/firmware/drives/new/1541/1541-e000.901229-01.bin
they then need to be placed in /media/Assets/c64/common/ as follows
/media/Assets/c64/common/basic.bin
/media/Assets/c64/common/characters.bin
/media/Assets/c64/common/kernal.bin
/media/Assets/c64/common/1540-c000.bin
/media/Assets/c64/common/1541-e000.bin
As of Analogue firmware version 2.2 normal C64 .prg files can be placed in
/media/Assets/c64/common/ and loaded.
Suggestions are Supermon+64 and the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) converted to PSID64 format.
For games it is recommended to get hold of the OneLoad64 collection of 2100+
titles OneLoad64-Games-Collection-v5.7z (just google it). From what I can
tell the majority of the collection's crunched .prg files (found in
AlternativeFormats/PRGs/Crunched/) load up properly. It is important to pick
the crunched ones as the uncrunched will attempt to replace the entire RAM
which is not supported while the system is running. Pocket appears to truncate
directories containing more than 1500 files so indexing as below is suggested.
$ p7zip -d OneLoad64-Games-Collection-v5.7z
$ cd AlternativeFormats/PRGs/Crunched/
$ for letter in {a..z}; do mkdir ${letter^}; mv ${letter}*.prg ${letter^}/; mv ${letter^}*.prg ${letter^}/; done
$ for digit in {0..9}; do mkdir ${digit}; mv ${digit}*.prg ${digit}/; done
Of course as the core is in development not every .prg will function
correctly. So to avoid frustration and help new users out we have the following
wiki page Working
PRGs that anyone
(on github) can edit. Please feel free to update it with your findings!
Experimental 1541 drive support (read only) is included. As the core tries to
emulate the real drive using the original ROMs it needs the raw GCR bitstream
that the read head would see as input. In other words the common .d64 format
is not directly supported but rather the lower level .g64 format must be
used.
A bit further down the road the housekeeping CPU could probably perform this
conversion on the fly but right now .d64 files need to be converted to .g64
format manually.
The utility program nibconv from
NIBTools can be used to
convert between .d64 and .g64. For Linux it is obtained and built as
follows (for windows pre-built executables are available).
$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/OpenCBM/OpenCBM.git
$ cd OpenCBM
$ make -f LINUX/Makefile
Once the .g64 slot is loaded from the Core Settings->Load G64 Slot #0
file browser normal C64 disk commands can be applied such as
LOAD"$",8
LIST
to get a directory listing of the disk. Note that on the C64 keyboard " is
<SHIFT>+2 and $ is <SHIFT>+4 (read the section about sticky keys for how
to access the shift modifier on the virtual keyboard).
Pressing left-of-analogue brings up (toggles) the on-screen-display containing a virtual keyboard and a small menu system for settings.
For the virtual keyboard the face-x button toggles sticky keys (useful for modifiers such as shift) and the face-y button clears any sticky key. Normal key press is accomplished with the face-a button.
Pressing trig-l1 and trig-r1 navigates through the different menu tabs.
Loading .prg files is accomplished by first selecting the file in the AP's
Core Settings->Load PRG Slot #0 file browser and after that injecting it
from the PRGS menu tab.
Controllers can be mapped to C64 joystick ports in the MISC menu tab and there you will also find a reset button for the emulator core.
A physical keyboard is supported while docked. The keyboard is expected to show
up on the third input (i.e. cont3_joy). For details on the key mapping see
table hid2c64 in source file src/bios/main.c.
