This is the emulator for the 8bit Steckschwein homebrew computer forked from the X16 naked Emulator and adapted to blueMSX. It only depends on SDL and therefore can be compiled on all modern operating systems.
Binary releases for MacOS, Windows and x86_64 Linux are available on the releases page.
The emulator itself is dependent only on SDL. However, to run the emulated system you will also need a compatible rom.bin ROM image. This will be
loaded from the directory containing the emulator binary, or you can use the -rom .../path/to/rom.bin option.
WARNING: Older versions of the ROM might not work in newer versions of the emulator, and vice versa.
You can build a Steckschwein ROM image yourself using the build instructions in the Steckschwein Repository. The rom.bin included in the latest release of the emulator may also work with the HEAD of this repo, but this is not guaranteed.
The SDL Version 1.2 development package is available as a distribution package with most major versions of Linux:
- Red Hat:
yum install SDL-devel - Debian:
apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev
Type make to build the source. The output will be steckschwein-emu in the current directory. Remember you will also need a rom.bin as described above.
Steps for compiling WebAssembly/HTML5 can be found here.
You can start x16emu/x16emu.exe either by double-clicking it, or from the command line. The latter allows you to specify additional arguments.
- When starting
x16emuwithout arguments, it will pick up the system ROM (rom.bin) from the executable's directory. - The system ROM filename/path can be overridden with the
-romcommand line argument. -keymaptells the KERNAL to switch to a specific keyboard layout. Use it without an argument to view the supported layouts.-sdcardlets you specify an SD card image (partition table + FAT32).-prglets you specify a.prgfile that gets injected into RAM after start.-baslets you specify a BASIC program in ASCII format that automatically typed in (and tokenized).-runexecutes the application specified through-prgor-basusingRUNorSYS, depending on the load address.-scalescales video output to an integer multiple of 640x480-echocauses all KERNAL/BASIC output to be printed to the host's terminal. Enable this and use the BASIC command "LIST" to convert a BASIC program to ASCII (detokenize).-gif <filename>[,wait]to record the screen into a GIF. See below for more info.-scalescales video output to an integer multiple of 640x480-qualitychange image scaling algorithm qualitynearest: nearest pixel samplinglinear: linear filteringbest: (default) anisotropic filtering
-logenables one or more types of logging (e.g.-log KS):K: keyboard (key-up and key-down events)S: speed (CPU load, frame misses)V: video I/O reads and writes
-debugenables the debugger.-dumpconfigure system dump (e.g.-dump CB):C: CPU registers (7 B: A,X,Y,SP,STATUS,PC)R: RAM (40 KiB)B: Banked RAM (2 MiB)V: Video RAM and registers (128 KiB VRAM, 32 B composer registers, 512 B pallete, 16 B layer0 registers, 16 B layer1 registers, 16 B sprite registers, 2 KiB sprite attributes)
- When compiled with
WITH_YM2151,-soundcan be used to specify the output sound device. - When compiled with
#define TRACE,-tracewill enable an instruction trace on stdout.
Run x16emu -h to see all command line options.
The X16 uses a PS/2 keyboard, and the ROM currently supports several different layouts. The following table shows their names, and what keys produce different characters than expected:
| Name | Description | Differences |
|---|---|---|
| en-us | US | [`] ⇒ [←], [~] ⇒ [π], [\] ⇒ [£] |
| en-gb | United Kingdom | [`] ⇒ [←], [~] ⇒ [π] |
| de | German | [§] ⇒ [£], [´] ⇒ [^], [^] ⇒ [←], [°] ⇒ [π] |
| nordic | Nordic | key left of [1] ⇒ [←],[π] |
| it | Italian | [\] ⇒ [←], [|] ⇒ [π] |
| pl | Polish (Programmers) | [`] ⇒ [←], [~] ⇒ [π], [\] ⇒ [£] |
| hu | Hungarian | [\] ⇒ [←], [|] ⇒ [π], [§] ⇒ [£] |
| es | Spanish | [|] ⇒ π, \ ⇒ [←], Alt + [<] ⇒ [£] |
| fr | French | [²] ⇒ [←], [§] ⇒ [£] |
| de-ch | Swiss German | [^] ⇒ [←], [°] ⇒ [π] |
| fr-be | Belgian French | [²] ⇒ [←], [³] ⇒ [π] |
| fi | Finnish | [§] ⇒ [←], [½] ⇒ [π] |
| pt-br | Portuguese (Brazil ABNT) | [\] ⇒ [←], [|] ⇒ [π] |
Keys that produce international characters (like [ä] or [ç]) will not produce any character.
Since the emulator tells the computer the position of keys that are pressed, you need to configure the layout for the computer independently of the keyboard layout you have configured on the host.
Use the F9 key to cycle through the layouts, or set the keyboard layout at startup using the -keymap command line argument.
The following keys can be used for controlling games:
| Keyboard Key | NES Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Ctrl | A |
| Alt | B |
| Space | SELECT |
| Enter | START |
| Cursor Up | UP |
| Cursor Down | DOWN |
| Cursor Left | LEFT |
| Cursor Right | RIGHT |
- Ctrl + R will reset the computer.
- Ctrl + V will paste the clipboard by injecting key presses.
- Ctrl + S will save a system dump (configurable with
-dump) to disk. - Ctrl + Return will toggle full screen mode.
On the Mac, use the Cmd key instead.
With the argument -gif, followed by a filename, a screen recording will be saved into the given GIF file. Please exit the emulator before reading the GIF file.
If the option ,wait is specified after the filename, it will start recording on POKE $9FB5,2. It will capture a single frame on POKE $9FB5,1 and pause recording on POKE $9FB5,0. PEEK($9FB5) returns a 128 if recording is enabled but not active.
On startup, the X16 presents direct mode of BASIC V2. You can enter BASIC statements, or line numbers with BASIC statements and RUN the program, just like on Commodore computers.
- To stop execution of a BASIC program, hit the RUN/STOP key (Esc in the emulator), or Ctrl + C.
- To insert a character, press Shift + Backspace.
- To clear the screen, press Shift + Home.
- The X16 does not have a STOP+RESTORE function.
If the system ROM contains any version of the KERNAL, the LOAD ($FFD5) and SAVE ($FFD8) KERNAL calls are intercepted by the emulator if the device is 1 (which is the default). So the BASIC statements
LOAD"$
LOAD"FOO.PRG
LOAD"IMAGE.PRG",1,1
SAVE"BAR.PRG
will target the host computer's local filesystem.
The emulator will interpret filesnames relative to the directory it was started in. Note that on macOS, when double-clicking the executable, this is the home directory.
To avoid incompatibility problems between the PETSCII and ASCII encodings, use lower case filenames on the host side, and unshifted filenames on the X16 side.
BASIC programs are encoded in a tokenized form, they are not simply ASCII files. If you want to edit BASIC programs on the host's text editor, you need to convert it between tokenized BASIC form and ASCII.
- To convert ASCII to BASIC, reboot the machine and paste the ASCII text using Ctrl + V (Mac: Cmd + V). You can now run the program, or use the
SAVEBASIC command to write the tokenized version to disk. - To convert BASIC to ASCII, start x16emu with the -echo argument,
LOADthe BASIC file, and typeLIST. Now copy the ASCII version from the terminal.
Please see the KERNAL/BASIC documentation.
The debugger requires -debug to start. Without it it is effectively disabled.
There are 2 panels you can control. The code panel, the top left half, and the data panel, the bottom half of the screen. The displayed address can be changed using keys 0-9 and A-F, in a 'shift and roll' manner (easier to see than explain). To change the data panel address, press the shift key and type 0-9 A-F. The top write panel is fixed.
The debugger keys are similar to the Microsoft Debugger shortcut keys, and work as follows
| Key | Description |
|---|---|
| F1 | resets the shown code position to the current PC |
| F2 | resets the 65C02 CPU but not any of the hardware. |
| F5 | is used to return to Run mode, the emulator should run as normal. |
| F9 | sets the breakpoint to the currently code position. |
| F10 | steps 'over' routines - if the next instruction is JSR it will break on return. |
| F11 | steps 'into' routines. |
| F12 | is used to break back into the debugger. This does not happen if you do not have -debug |
| TAB | when stopped, or single stepping, hides the debug information when pressed |
When -debug is selected the 65c02 STP Opcode ($DB) will break into the debugger automatically.
Effectively keyboard routines only work when the debugger is running normally. Single stepping through keyboard code will not work at present.
https://github.com/commanderx16/x16-emulator/wiki
- CPU: Full 65C02 instruction set (improved "fake6502")
- MSX Video (TMS9929, VDP9938, VDP9958)
- Mostly cycle exact emulation
- Supports almost all features: composer, two layers, sprites, progressive/interlaced
- VIA
- ROM/RAM banking
- PS/2 keyboard
- SD card (SPI)
- Sound (YM3812)
- VIA
- Does not support counters/timers/IRQs
- Does not support game controllers
Copyright (c) 2019 Michael Steil <mist64@mac.com>, www.pagetable.com. All rights reserved. License: 2-clause BSD
- Emulator: LOAD"$ (and LOAD"$",1) will show host uppercase filenames as garbage. Use Ctrl+N to switch to the X16 upper/lower character set for a workaround.
- 0.1 ?