nc100em is an Amstrad NC100/NC150/NC200 emulator for Unix/Linux. The main changes in 1.3 are a new SDL2-based version, NC150 support, NC200 floppy disk support (using John Elliott's lib765), and everyone being 21 years older than the last time I did a release.
The web page is here:
https://zgedneil.nfshost.com/nc100em.html
Thank you so much for this update.
Now I just need to figure out how I press the Hidden Menu key...
The traditional key for Menu is backquote (as that's what it does in ZCN) but I did also make it available on the context-menu key, at least in the SDL2 version. Or if you mean how to get the "secret" thing in the ROM software, I think that's Function and Menu, so you'd want Insert and backquote or something like that. The man page covers the keys from the emulator side at least, I've just put up a basic web conversion of that linked from the nc100em page.
OMW to download it.
Would it be possible for a future release to add support for serial port to be able to send/receive files from a real NC ? Last time I tried I had to use one software to send to the NC, another software to receive. And of course I dont remember their name...
Or do you know a software wich works both ways ?
Quote from: genesis8 on 10:46, 15 September 22Or do you know a software wich works both ways ?
On linux you could use minicom if you are on Windows I believe that https://extraputty.com would work.
Quote from: genesis8 on 10:46, 15 September 22OMW to download it.
Would it be possible for a future release to add support for serial port to be able to send/receive files from a real NC ? Last time I tried I had to use one software to send to the NC, another software to receive. And of course I dont remember their name...
Or do you know a software wich works both ways ?
I'd second minicom if you just want a serial comms program. Or do you want the emulator to link to a real NC directly? That's an interesting idea, but to be honest it's probably better to use a dedicated serial-handling program on the host.
Quote from: zgedneil on 13:07, 15 September 22I'd second minicom if you just want a serial comms program. Or do you want the emulator to link to a real NC directly? That's an interesting idea, but to be honest it's probably better to use a dedicated serial-handling program on the host.
Yes, that way it's sure that it's the same xmodem variant used on both ends.
Or it could be interesting to develop a 2 player game using serial port.
I just checked the ZCN page, when do you think you will release v1.4 ?
As this new version supports the NC200 floppy drive, could CP/Mish by david Given (http://cowlark.com/cpmish/index.html) be used ? And adding the support of PCMCIA II mass storage cards as a hard disk as he did ?
ZCN 1.4 should probably be ready within a month or so - even just reading through zcn.txt and the man pages to check they still make sense is going to take a while. Basically I have a to-do list with about a dozen things left, half is bug-related and half is checking/testing stuff.
The main changes will be actual NC150 support, ramdisk support on NC200 and NC150 (so you no longer need a memory card if you can make do with a tiny 45k or 61k drive), support for all the NC keyboard layouts I know of plus a US layout, and the inclusion of preinstalled memory card images intended for emulators.
I did try cpmish in nc100em - well, an old release at least - but no luck. I don't think I did the floppy support well enough for it to work, frankly. I had some trouble with IRQs and ended up just fiddling with it enough to get the ROM working, but hopefully I can figure things out properly at some point.
The Flash stuff I think you're referring to sounds a bit dodgy to me on the real NC200 (I get the impression that it draws more power than the NC200 is really happy with). I suppose it could be added to nc100em, but I don't have any plans to do that currently.
I've now added a browser-based variant enc100em to that same nc100em page, which is runnable on the website if you have a suitable browser (if needs wasm support, so that means a recent major browser basically). It only runs ZCN, as I think anything else would need the original ROM, and there's no way to save anything so it's just a bit of fun really.
There's also a version 1.3a of nc100em, but it's a pretty minor bugfix release.
Thanks for the update!
I am not sure, but AFAIK there are currently no features for debugging included? (just a stupid memory dump during runtime would be already fine)
Are you planning something like this?
(I still want to port SymbOS to the NC1x0/200, graphic drivers are finished)
I never had much interest in doing that really - nc100em proper (not the web one) does normally dump RAM to a file when you exit, at least. I remember seeing a fork of an older nc100em on Github (maybe the Nilquader one?), which looked to have some sort of debugging stuff.
Hi Russel,
RAM dump is already fine for me.
Anyway it's great that you are back!
One question regarding FDC support:
I am currently using the 1.2 Nilquader fork, as I need it for Windows. It seems, that it reacts on FDC commands, but I don't see any activity with a DSK file.
I wonder it it's possible to compile 1.3 for Windows with FDC emulation?
Anyway I am looking forward to port SymbOS now.
1.3 is for Unix/Linux as ever, but if you really need to use that it shouldn't be too hard to run Linux in Windows at this point.
Do bear in mind that 1.3's floppy support is a bit rough. It works with the ROM OS and will boot ZCN, but I couldn't get an old CP/Mish disk image to boot for example.
Also, I should probably clarify the RAM-saving on exit. Normally this happens with a proper power-button-like exit, which might not be useful when doing very low-level stuff. But you can just force a RAM save then exit by writing zero to port 70h, at the cost of the NC resetting/crashing when you start the emulator again.
Quote from: zgedneil on 10:59, 20 June 23Also, I should probably clarify the RAM-saving on exit. Normally this happens with a proper power-button-like exit, which might not be useful when doing very low-level stuff. But you can just force a RAM save then exit by writing zero to port 70h, at the cost of the NC resetting/crashing when you start the emulator again.
Yes, that works fine! It's cool, my first Z80 machine, which can turn off itself :D
One more question:
Currently I have a nc200.card file in the directory, which is 32K.
I guess this is the PCMCIA SRAM? Can I just blow this file up to 1MB to have a full external 1MB ram?
I'm not sure if the nc100em fork changed things, but yes, that should be just a simple image of the card's memory. So anything that'll give you a 1MB file is fine. (Usually nc100em comes with a little shell script to do this.)