Thought i already posted this but ill try again
Today is a great day for the Dreamcast Emulation scene, in news submitted to DCEmulation Julian Brown has released a BBC Micro Emulator for the Dreamcast Console, heres the news from his readme:
This is a heavily-modified version of Dave Gilbert’s BeebEm emulator,
able to run on a Sega Dreamcast game console. It emulates an Acorn Model
B BBC Microcomputer.
This version is based on the best Unix version I could find at the
time, Patrick Kaell’s patched 0.9p1, which is an enhanced version of
Dave Gilbert’s last release, 0.9.
I am using the homebrew DC operating system KallistiOS by Dan Potter
(& a cast of thousands), and a serial cable from Lik Sang. Thanks are
also due to John Kortink, whose reverse-engineered SN76489 sound-chip
information I am using to make authentic BBC white noise.
The modifications I have made to the code are as follows. (To achieve
enough speed, parts are fairy unrecognizable…)
* Porting to Dreamcast/KallistiOS (1.2.0 at time of writing)
* Rewritten video code to use a PowerVR twiddled+paletted texture
+ FastTables changed to 4-bit
+ Bilinear filtering
+ Looks nice! (To me, at least)
* 6502 core (drastically!) refactored into an “indirect threaded
interpreter”
+ Got rid of slow global variables
+ Uses GCC labels-as-values extension
+ …much faster!
+ Replaces main loop (in main.cc)
– A bit buggy, I think
* Added event queueing system
+ Drastically reduces work per emulated instruction
+ Used by video, system VIA, user VIA, disc, keyboard
* Sound runs more-or-less entirely on the AICA coprocessor
The emulator currently supports the DC keyboard, but not the standard
DC controllers. I plan to add DC controller support with per-game keyboard
(or even joystick) mappings.
It runs “almost” as fast as a real BBC — a bit slower for some games,
a bit faster maybe for others.
This version doesn’t quite run on Linux any more, but most of my changes
are #ifdef’ed or in seperate files.
Be warned this is more of a developer release but very interesting still. Check it out at this address –> http://panic.cs.bris.ac.uk/~jules/beebem-dc.html