[sebhc] More on Emulator progress

[Dave Dunfield]

Lee, Steven, Mark,

Thanks for the information - very helpful.

I did some more work on the emulator today (nothing like a bit of discussion
to get you "back into" a suspended project) - I have now "connected" the
front panel to the virtual CPU - installed the PAM8 ROM into the memory map,
and so far everything is working well.

PAM8 comes up - you can poke around, look at memory and registers just like
the real H8 (which I have sitting beside my desk for comparison).

I even entered (through the virtual front panel keypad) the test program at
the start of the H8 operation manual, it runs and displays "your H8"
"IS up And" "running"  "|-| |-| |-|", then beeps twice and repeats - exactly
what the real H8 does!

Still lots of work to do, unkludge some quickie patches and fully implement
the switchable console/terminal, as well as the full terminal emulation and
the disk controller, but it's looking really good so far.

No doubt I shall call upon your assistance in the coming days!

Btw, found an interesting "quirk" in PAM8 while getting this going - at first I
did not bother to "write protect" the ROM ... With RAM all the way to FFFF, PAM8
goes into an endless loop trying to locate the top of RAM - it wraps into the
ROM and keeps on going if it's writable... Once I made the ROM truly read only,
there was no problem!

Regarding Mark's questions:

> Why not work on Dave Wallace's emulator?

Because this emulator requires the latest/most bloated/viral winblows and
is therefore useless to me... No point going further into this discussion,
I simply have no interest in being involved with such a project.


> What platform are you making this for?

DOS - will also run on all versions of Winblows, Linux DOSemu, SoftPC on
a Mac, and even PocketDOS on my handheld (that looks really cool - pocket
PC with an H8 front panel on it!) - It's written using my own C compiler
which does not employ any "tricks" that cause compatibility problems. I
run my code on all platforms listed above (and more) with no known problems,
so the emulator should run anywhere that supports plain old DOS.

Don't bother telling me why you think it should be a wintendo game - I
really don't expect everyone to like it. It's free... if you don't like
it, you can delete it and be out nothing - I won't mind.


> License and Copyright Information 

Haven't decided yet. The executable will definately be free, I'll probably
make the source code available as well, but I'll think about that when it's
further along.


Regards,
-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Vintage computing equipment collector.
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

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