Version 0.87 of ASp, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator has just been released. A news item will appear shortly.

Please vote in the poll to give your opinion of ASp, and post your views about it and other emulators.

Thanks for your time...

@Laser

Great emulator!!!!!. Running fine on aga ond no aga modes.

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@Laser

Working brilliantly here on OS4 (almost certainly due to me bugging you every time it refused to work - thanks for the very quick fixes btw). As far as I'm concerned, it has been the only Amiga-based Spectrum emulator available since, ooh, ages ago.

Okay, I know there are others, I still used ZXAM every now and then until recently solely for the tape save support (until ASp gained this feature). Other than CBSpeccy, the other 128K capable emulators were all way too slow on 68k.

ASp is so good I haven't even looked at any more recent competition. There are only a couple of features missing, most notably +3/disk support. It is certainly comparable to the emulators available on other platforms (last time I checked, anyway), with the added advantage of not running on Windows.

Keep it going, even small infrequent updates are much appreciated.

Chris

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"Miracles we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer" - AJS on Hyperion
Avatar is Tabitha by Eric W Schwartz

Speccy sucks! Z80 sucks! Long live C64!

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MorphOS, classic Amiga, demoscene, and stuff
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Is there an OS4 native Spectrum emulator? Seems a bit silly to emulate a 68000 in order to then emulate a Z80.

@dangerman

ASp is easily fast enough, even without JIT enabled.

If you want a native one, you could always port FUSE. Good luck, I had enough trouble trying to get it to compile under Linux - and IMHO it's nowhere near as good, or wasn't when I last used it.

Alternatively, you could offer to port Ian's 68k assembler Z80 emulation core to PPC assembly

Chris

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"Miracles we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer" - AJS on Hyperion
Avatar is Tabitha by Eric W Schwartz

@Chris_Y

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Working brilliantly here on OS4

Good, good!

Will be interested to hear if all OS4 related issues have gone away now.

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almost certainly due to me bugging you every time it refused to work

That's what I want.

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There are only a couple of features missing, most notably +3/disk support

Since that one may be the trickiest to do ... What are the other, less notable, shortcomings?

Thanks for your support!

@dangerman

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Seems a bit silly to emulate a 68000 in order to then emulate a Z80.

You're right. The overheads must be hideous.

Sadly, at the time I started it, it seemed like a really good idea (TM) to use 68K asm instead of C.

I may rewrite it in C one day or, more likely, someone will port an open-source emulator from elsewhere.

In the meantime, I am assured it runs well enough with OS4, JIT or otherwise.

@Laser

Another update great, I will need more time to play but works ok so far apart from amigainput but I can't seem to get this to work with anything except PacMan05 and the inbuilt calibration tool.

@Laser

Why not a spectrum-based amiga emulator?

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The problem with AmigaOS on PPC isn't that PPC is big-endian. The problem with AmigaOS on PPC is that PPC is dead-endian.

@Laser

Forgot to say, the menu item Control=>Tape=>Playing is showing up as being mutually exclusive, when it should probably just be a regular toggle item.

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Since that one may be the trickiest to do ... What are the other, less notable, shortcomings?

Just crazy things like Multiface emulation, RZX support, direct audio input (for loading real tapes), mouse emulation, Interface 1 serial ports and the other random stuff that most people won't need, and the people that do will only use about once.

A disassembler, BASIC listing extraction and loading a text file into BASIC would be useful too. I guess these could be written in ARexx with READRAM, WRITERAM, PEEK and POKE given enough knowledge of the internals of the Spectrum (ie. by somebody other than me)

@Arnie

Make sure you assign your joystick to "Port 1 - Joystick" in the LowLevel tab of AmigaInput prefs. Remove everything else so there are no other devices assigned to lowlevel.library (actually, you may want to assign a different joystick or a mouse to port 0, but leave that for now until you've tested it)

In ASp, select "lowlevel.lib simple" from the Settings=>Joystick menu.

If you select Sinclair 2 in the same menu, you should at least get some numbers appearing in BASIC when you move the controller or push the button assigned to RED.

Chris

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"Miracles we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer" - AJS on Hyperion
Avatar is Tabitha by Eric W Schwartz

@Laser

Great work

Im a big retro game fan, so any/all emulators for Amiga OS are welcome additions in my opinion. In specific regards to asp though, its very nice, best speccy emu for Amiga (my opinion again, but a well researched one ). Even runs speccy versions of Doom, Wolfenstien and Abes Odysee (3 "benchmark" proggies for me to judge how accurate an emu is).
Now, any chance of SAM support ??

@Laser

Great, An Amstrad CPC emulator would be cool.

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A1200T 603e 330Mhz - Mediator TX OS4.1 F.E.
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@fishy_fis
Speccy version of Doom?!?!?

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Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@Laser
Aren't there programs which try to convert assembler to C? Although I think they are mostly expensive commercial services, and/or aimed at x86 assembler. Still, might be worth investigating.

Alternatively, it could be feasible to gradually convert parts of the source code from assembler to a high-level language (aka "refactor" it). This might be hard to do in C, but AmigaE allows mixing of assembler & E code.

Last edited by ChrisH on 02-May-2006 at 09:27 AM.

_________________
Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

Has anyone been able to actually download ASp from his web site today? It gets stuck when it has downloaded most of the file (e.g. 133KB).

EDIT: Downloaded it now. Don't know what the problem was.

Last edited by ChrisH on 02-May-2006 at 04:19 PM.

_________________
Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@Chris_Y

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ASp is easily fast enough, even without JIT enabled.

Oh absolutely - I didn't doubt the speed. It just occured to me that it was a PPC emulating a 68000 emulating a Z80. :)

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If you want a native one, you could always port FUSE.

There used to be a port of X128 for the Amiga Classic. I'm not sure if the sources exist for it anywhere, but that might be a better place to start...

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Alternatively, you could offer to port Ian's 68k assembler Z80 emulation core to PPC assembly

Isn't there a tool to convert 68k->PPC automatically? The only problem might be if it doesn't create "readable" code. Then maintenance becomes a nightmare.

@Laser

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Sadly, at the time I started it, it seemed like a really good idea (TM) to use 68K asm instead of C.

Given the speed of Classic Amigas, I think it was a very sensible choice at that time.

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In the meantime, I am assured it runs well enough with OS4, JIT or otherwise.

Definitely - Manic Miner works great :) Thanks for all the work.

@Chris_Y

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menu item Control=>Tape=>Playing is showing up as being mutually exclusive, when it should probably just be a regular toggle item.

You're right! Well spotted. But it looks the same symbol and behaviour here regardless, both with and without MagicMenu - what do you see this with?

Your suggestions are noted, thanks. The most likely of them would be a disassembler/debugger.

@ChrisH

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Has anyone been able to actually download ASp from his web site today?

I just tried from work and it seems ok.