Back when I was at school (slates, chalk, that sort of thing, you know…) the BBC Micro was a thing: one of the first home computers, based around the 6502 processor. Quite likely it’s responsible for setting the future direction of my life. I spent a huge amount of time messing about with them in my teens, writing software both to earn myself some spare cash and for things at school.
Move on several years once x86-based PCs became affordable as home computers and with the arrival of Linux I decided to write an emulator for the BBC Micro running on Linux under X11. It actually worked reasonably well at the time; enough to play some of the original games I’d enjoyed, certainly. Even now I recall sitting in my employer’s office in Palo Alto after work when I was there to do some training or something similar, designing fonts for the teletext display mode. Here’s a random selection of screenshots…
Anyhow, I was having a little grub around in my filesystem the other day and discovered the code again, so after adding some CMake build files to take over from the original Imakefile system, I’ve uploaded it to github. Sound doesn’t work any more because as far as I recall it used ALSA, but I’ll see if I can fix that in the coming weeks and perhaps make a few other improvements too.