Colin Piggot wrote: > Hmmm... the temptation would be there to run SimCoupe at > higher speeds, and yes great things could be done... but it > would lose the feel of the real machine along the way.
I do agree with that aspect of it, in that it only makes sense to emulate features that can/do exist on the real machine. I suppose it could be extended to allow prototyping of upcoming hardware too. Adding features like hardware scrolling support to the emulator would certainly be wrong, IMO! My removing Spectrum emulation from SimCoupe seemed a bit contraversial at the time, but was part of the same philosophy. As well as removing Spectrum-specific initialisation, I tightened up the overall hardware setup to be truer to the SAM (such as the CLUT and ports being zeroed). It doesn't stop you using a Spectrum ROM image, but you'll now need to modify it to set up paging and palette like for a real machine. Besides, there are plenty of dedicated Spectrum emulators out there already that already do a better job :-) SimCoupe does have some convenience features that aren't true to the real machine, such as turbo mode, fast disk access, fast startup, and auto-booting. Adding support for fixed variable speeds (25%, 50%, 200%, ...) probably falls under the same category, and is something I've got on the ToDo list for a couple of people. Allowing variable CPU speed is a much greyer area, unless it was done in a peripheral-type way like both SAM accelerator prototypes. > and I feel that just takes the magic away from it all. Agreed. CKay on WoS has a BASIC OS that would be _improved_ by running fast on SimCoupe, but it does still run on a real SAM. I'm not keen on the idea of software that would ONLY run on the emulator. All just my opinion, of course - I'd be interested to hear from anyone that disagrees... Si
