Amstrad Windows 7/8 Emulators being actively developed

[jonesypeter]

Hi,


I wondered if any Amstrad CPC Emulators are still being actively developed? WinAPE does not seem to have been touched since 2011.


Best wishes


Peter Jones

[ralferoo]

Both WinApe and WinCPC work fine with Windows 7. No idea about Windows 8, but I believe it should run all Windows 7 programs in non-Metro mode.

[mahlemiut]

MESS should run fine on Windows 7 or 8 (also Linux, OS X, BSD...), and is always under development (especially now that I fixed an issue with DSK support a couple of days ago ).

[Devilmarkus]

WinAPE does not seem to have been touched since 2011.

You can be sure: It only seems so

Well, my emulator is in development, too... But it should work fine on Win8, too...

[Gryzor]

Frankly, I'd love to see a new emulator come in and dazzle me, but what could it offer that is not already covered?

[Munchausen]

I recently got DOS installed on my ancient Pentium 90 laptop, just so that I could make discs for the CPC.


Of course, with a fresh DOS machine around, I simply had to install a few of my old DOS games. And then, since I was doing stuff with CPC disc images, it only made good sense to put some CPC emulators on there too!


Well, I have been dazzled by CPC emulators on this humble machine. There are so many DOS emulators out there, and I haven't tried them all, but I can actually run full speed CPC emulation!


The only trouble is if a game/demo does something unusual (e.g. rtype 128) then the emulators tend to fall over. cpce works with everything I've thrown at it, but only at about half speed. But what more can I really expect?

[SyX]

Frankly, I'd love to see a new emulator come in and dazzle me, but what could it offer that is not already covered?

A lot, for starters:
* A better FDC emulation (Basun and others).
* Accurate CRT  (CRT, no CRTC, that is other matter ) display emulation (correct aspect-ratio, shadow mask, aperture grille, interframe blending, support NTSC, full PAL size -384x288, a few of us have attached our CPCs to nice TVs by scart -, ...)
* Support for 100/120Hz LightBoost strobe (no, i don't have one of these monitors, but if i would have one, i would love to use with CPC emus).
* Breakpoints when the z80 read/write a byte from ram/rom.
* A TCP port or another way of controlling the emulator/debugger in remote mode.
* Better CRTC/GA emulation.
* Use a sane and open (for other authors can use too) snapshot format, that no crash 3/10 times.
* Use a sane and open session recording format... it's even worst than the snapshot affair.
* The sound emulation must pass the McKlain seal of quality.
* The z80 should pass the ZEXALL tests with perfect marks.
* An API for people can add hardware expansions (it would help a lot to prototype and develop the software for new hardware projects and for adding support to a lot of old expansions that the emu author can be very busy to add, as mouses, multilfaces, brunword, speech synthetizers, midis, serial ports, ethernet, ...).
* Support for all those peripherals in the last point.
* Zooming (bye bye borders ) and rotatind the emulation screen (Manic Miner 90º ).
* Support of 3 fire button in CPCs and analog input in CPC+.
* CPC+ emulation.
* GX4000 mode
* Have in one place (emulator) all the great features that nowdays are split between in a few cpc emulators.
* A video overlay, for showing messages as disk has just inserted, ...
.
.
.

[Gryzor]

Fair enough, but these are mostly improvements, nothing radical. Any new emulator would likely face many more problems than these. Also, most people don't even notice them.


The video overlay for messages, now... I really like the way it's done in STeam.

[jonesypeter]

Hi,


Coming from a ZX Spectrum background (Sorry), I very much like Spectaculator which is updated regularly and has a nice Windows 7 interface.  I for one would be happy to pay for something which was updated regularly.


Best wishes


Peter Jones

[TFM]

* The z80 should pass the ZEXALL tests with perfect marks.

Don't the CPC itself fail in 3 of the tests?

[Devilmarkus]

Don't the CPC itself fail in 3 of the tests?

True.

[McKlain]

* The sound emulation must pass the McKlain seal of quality.

[SyX]

Don't the CPC itself fail in 3 of the tests?

Maybe was an old version of the tests, i know that it has been a few modifications for deleting all the "zxisms" in the tests for being a exclusive z80 check 

[Gryzor]

Indeed Spectaculator is a great emulator (hey, site down at the moment!). I wouldn't mind paying for a similar thing for the CPC...

[TFM]

I mean ... honestly... JavaCPC already has a lot of the desired features, like screen filters, CRT emulations and so on.

[Gryzor]

Yes, but as always with Java, it feels a bit heavy...

[TFM]

Oh well, I think the new update loads more quick.

[EgoTrip]

Please don't encourage CPC emulator coders to start charging for their work. Emulation should remain free. Spectaculator can fuck off.

[Gryzor]

Why should it? Nobody likes paying money and everyone likes free, of course, but an emulator is as much a fruit of labour as everything else; and if the programmer felt the need to charge for it, so be it.

[Devilmarkus]

That's the reason, why JavaCPC is Donationware

ALL is free, incl. registration.

It has no tricks, no whatever...

But when people like what they have, they are allowed to donate.

[EgoTrip]

If I was going to pay for an emulator, then I will buy hardware instead. Its that simple. If someone wants to charge then I can't stop them, but I do not have to buy it. I was also under the impression that emulation was allowed by the companies as long as it remained free. Maybe this stance has changed and they get a cut of the profits from software like Spectaculator?

[Gryzor]

Er... why, did anyone say that "you have to buy it"? You can spend your money on anything you want, who cares? If you wanna buy a real CPC by all means do, if you want to buy extra towels for the guest bathroom all's well, this doesn't mean people shouldn't charge for their emulators You can't project your own wishes and make them a general 'must'.


As for the other argument, I think we covered that a while back - companies can't do anything, as long as you don't distribute copyrighted material with the emulator they don't have a saying.

[Edit]
According to Wikipedia, and concerning the USofUh:

As computers and global computer networks continued to advance and emulator developers grew more skilled in their work, the length of time between the commercial release of a console and its successful emulation began to shrink. Fifth generation consoles such as the Nintendo 64, the Sony PlayStation and sixth generation handhelds, such as the Game Boy Advance, saw significant progress toward emulation during their production. This led to an effort by console manufacturers to stop unofficial emulation, but consistent failures such as Sega v. Accolade 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992), Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation 203 F.3d 596 (2000), and Sony Computer Entertainment America v. Bleem 214 F.3d 1022 (2000),[1] have had the opposite effect. According to all legal precedents, emulation is legal within the United States. However, unauthorized distribution of copyrighted code remains illegal, according to both country specific copyright and international copyright law under the Berne Convention.[2] Obtaining games through methods not authorized by the developer or publisher is illegal in the United States.
Under United States law, obtaining a dumped copy of the original machine's BIOS is legal under the ruling Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., 964 F.2d 965 (9th Cir. 1992) as fair use as long as the user obtained a legally purchased copy of the machine. However, several emulators for platforms such as Game Boy Advance are capable of running without a BIOS file, using high-level emulation to simulate BIOS subroutines at a slight cost in emulation accuracy.

[Bryce]

No emulator in the world, free or commercial, can emulate the smell of a retro computer, the feeling of real CPC keys clicking under yours fingers or pressing down the tape lid, pressing play and doing the two-finger start. You can't beat real hardware

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

True. Also, off-topic

[Bryce]

True. Also, off-topic

Since when did that matter?

Bryce.