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Emulator Overview

Peter Wilson edited this page Dec 11, 2023 · 1 revision

EtchedPixels has developed an "Emulation Kit" which provides an emulation of a wide range of retro computers include my retro Z80 system. The emulation in his implementation is sufficient to help him port both Fuxiz and RomWBW to my hardware.

I've currently forked his EmulatorKit repo and extended the support to be a more complete model of the hardware. Eventually I would hope to retire the fork and revert to the source repository. It seems a pity to fork a large repo simply to make changes to a single file!

Currently I'm only emulating the base Z80 card, that is excluding the video and PIO cards.

Getting the emulator

  • Clone the Emulator Kit into a new directory.
  • Build the z80retro target (make z80retro)
  • Run the emulator and point it at a 512KB ROM image file (-r command line option)

Building the emulator

The emulator is written in C. You'll need a standard GNU make system and the GNU C compiler gcc.

Creating/obtaining a ROM image

The emulator needs a ROM image. The image is a binary file that needs to be exactly 512KB long (524,288 bytes).

The standard Z80 ZLoader image can be built

Running the emulator

Create a run directory somewhere outside of the main tree. Change into that direction then run z80retro from the Emulator Kit directory.