Can the CPC emulate older consoles?

[mr_lou]

Although the CPC is my favourite, it was not the first machine I spent time with. That was the Phillips G7000.

Back when I was about 14-15 years old, I fantasized about making CPC versions of some of the G7000 games, and even today I still find a lot of the G7000 games fun to play.

A while back we saw that the CPC could emulate the arcade Pac-man game. Very impressive.

So why not emulate e.g. a Phillips G7000 or an Atari 2600?

[arnoldemu]

Although the CPC is my favourite, it was not the first machine I spent time with. That was the Phillips G7000.

Back when I was about 14-15 years old, I fantasized about making CPC versions of some of the G7000 games, and even today I still find a lot of the G7000 games fun to play.

A while back we saw that the CPC could emulate the arcade Pac-man game. Very impressive.

So why not emulate e.g. a Phillips G7000 or an Atari 2600?

Definitely no to Atari 2600. Different CPU, games intensively write to hardware registers each line, so you would have to emulate that. CPC doesn't have the power. I think accurate 2600 emulation has only been possible on fast PCs from the past 10 years.

I looked at Philips odyssey again different CPU, hardware sprites. Would be hard to get the speed. May be more possible to convert and simulate games on cpc.

Pacman had same CPU as cpc at the same speed. ROMs were patched to call cpc functions to draw sprites. Less emulation, more running original code that was patched to draw cpc sprites and use at.

More games could be done this way if also z80 and simplistic.

So I say no for others. But take game and remake for cpc is best.

[mr_lou]

Bummer...

I assumed, that since all games always only have very few sprites moving, that it would be a relative simple thing.

[Gryzor]

Nah. Games may have been simple, but pulling those 'simple' tricks on the ancient hardware required serious technical skills and feats. So you have to emulate these, not the end result. Doing ports would be ok, but emulating them..

[AMSDOS]

[ot]Not a Console but NEC put out a series of Machines (in Japan) starting with the PC-8001 (PC-8001A in the US) in 1979. They weren't strictly a true Z80, but were Z80 compatible so it could operate CP/M. Video Memory wise the first machine had 3k of RAM it operated at 4Mhz, launched with 16Kb of RAM it could be upgraded to 32Kb or 64Kb. It was one of the earlier machines with supported colour allowing up to 8 colours. Their second machine is perhaps more like an Amstrad which came out in 1982. It has 16Kb of Video Memory, however it allows 8 colours in 320x200 it came with 64kb as standard with a 4Mhz Z80 Compatible processor.

I thought that if someone were to trying to simulate some of the programs from that machine they would have to be reinterpreted from Japanese to whatever. While I was looking around on that Old Computers Website I found some advertisements for those machines which were French, though those machines seemed to be mostly popular in Japan even though they were launched in the US as well. When I've tried looking for anything which resembles a game for that machine though I seem to only find sites in Japanese, not that I'm bagging them out or anything. [/ot]

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Given the limited capability of the Odyssey2 I think you could write a game engine that provides the features of the hardware, and then reimplement the games on top of that.  But that wouldn't be emulation and it would take quite some time per game.  I don't know if you could write a 8048 to Z80 re-assembler to make porting the game logic easier, but even that sounds like a pain as soon as you get slightly different behaviour on nearest equivalent instructions.

[arnoldemu]

[ot]Not a Console but NEC put out a series of Machines (in Japan) starting with the PC-8001 (PC-8001A in the US) in 1979. They weren't strictly a true Z80, but were Z80 compatible so it could operate CP/M. Video Memory wise the first machine had 3k of RAM it operated at 4Mhz, launched with 16Kb of RAM it could be upgraded to 32Kb or 64Kb. It was one of the earlier machines with supported colour allowing up to 8 colours. Their second machine is perhaps more like an Amstrad which came out in 1982. It has 16Kb of Video Memory, however it allows 8 colours in 320x200 it came with 64kb as standard with a 4Mhz Z80 Compatible processor.

I thought that if someone were to trying to simulate some of the programs from that machine they would have to be reinterpreted from Japanese to whatever. While I was looking around on that Old Computers Website I found some advertisements for those machines which were French, though those machines seemed to be mostly popular in Japan even though they were launched in the US as well. When I've tried looking for anything which resembles a game for that machine though I seem to only find sites in Japanese, not that I'm bagging them out or anything. [/ot]

This is a potential example where the games could be hacked, cpc functions added, and the games played on cpc.

Are there any games of note for these systems?

[Optimus]

Maybe only a Chip-8 emulator. I heard there was one for C64, Spectrum, even TI calculator but not CPC yet. However it's so primitive it's easy to do (I started one on PC in one evening, unfinsihed though and no sound yet) and wanted to port it for CPC but left the project as usually. Not much to play there though, just a proof of concept.


But as a proof of concept, emuls of some 8bits, would be interesting. But too much work. I mean there was Simon Owen making ViC20 or Speccy for Sam Coupe, running at one sixth of the original speed, just a proof of concept, interesting coderwise but I guess not playable.

[AMSDOS]

This is a potential example where the games could be hacked, cpc functions added, and the games played on cpc.

Are there any games of note for these systems?

There's a bit of a site here with some software on it. In order to Download the Software, one has to register on the site. To view the stuff on their page you have to go to the bottom of the page and click on Cassette & Floppy for example to see what Games are in there.

It was some time ago I was looking at other sites which had PC-8001 software on it. They were in Japanese though, but from what I recall I think the games were written in BASIC.

Sadly I haven't really been able to check this computer out and given it was mainly popular computer in Japan, I don't know how easy it is to find some English Manuals for that computer. I guess the clue there is to look for the PC-8001A Manual.