Beech: a BBC Micro emulator (v0.3) 6

Yes, Beech can run Elite

Beech is a BBC Micro emulator. It emulates a Model B with 8271 DFS, and also supports the Music 500/5000 synthesizer.

The program is licensed under the GPL v2.

Requirements

• • os12.rom
  • basic2.rom
  • dfs.rom or wdfs.rom (optional, if you want to use disks; either the Acorn or Watford DFS will do)
  • ample.rom (optional, if you want to use the Music 5000)

Downloads

Please note that none of these downloads include ROMs, disks, tapes, or snapshots.

As well as Beech itself, you might need the Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable too. If Beech complains of missing DLLs, just download the appropriate redistributable from here and run it. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can get them direct from Microsoft.

How to use

How to build

Notes on the Music 500/5000

Music 500	Start the AMPLE interpreter with *AMPLE (or, if you have the 5000 ROM installed, use */AMPLE instead to force the disk version to load). If you want to play the song called SONG, just type "SONG" LOAD RUN and press Return, and it should start. If it produces an error instead, either the disk is missing some extra modules the song needs, or it’s a 5000 program, or possibly it’s just a bad file. Some disks have a MENU file you can load the same way.	Beech plays the blues
Music 5000	I’ve found that, although many 5000 disks have a !BOOT file, they don’t have the boot option set. If that’s the case, don’t ignore the !BOOT file because it’ll probably preload modules the music files will need. Either *OPT 4,3 and Shift+Break, or just *EXEC !BOOT manually. This should bring you into a menu system. From here you can load a song/program and play it just by selecting the appropriate options. Some disks have a JUKEBOX program which lets you choose songs from a menu.

• • Colin Fraser’s site
  • The AMPLINEX archive
  • Retro-kit.co.uk’s page on the Music 5000
  • David Banks’s reverse-engineering notes. These were very helpful, filling in gaps with my own efforts reverse-engineering the synth’s schematic, and providing confirmation where I’d actually got it right!

Known bugs

• • Very occasionally the shift keys seem to stick and won’t produce shifted characters. You can toggle the “PC Keyboard Mapping” checkbox to clear this.
  • Sound in general is slightly choppy. I need to use more precise timing code.
  • The Music 500/5000 synth outputs mono instead of stereo (easy to fix, I just haven’t got around to it).
  • The 500’s “SYNCRON” program sounds different from a recording of the real unit. Not sure why.
  • The teletext character rounding is wrong on the lowest scanline of each character. This is most noticeable with descenders and double-height.
  • Watch Impact’s demo mode. The ball falls through the bat!
  • Firetrack’s in-game screen flickers like crazy.

Things I’m thinking of adding

• • Better GUI (including fullscreen mode).
  • UI for configuring ROMs and sideways RAM.
  • Undocumented 6502 opcodes.
  • Tape writing.
  • Snapshot saving. (Would need a new UEF chunk type for the Music 5000’s internal RAM. Not sure who allocates chunk IDs.)
  • 1770 disk support, and therefore ADFS.
  • Internally it’d be pretty easy to add extra modules for the B+, Master and even Electron. It’d be very nice to have the BBC and Electron in one emulator.
  • Instant tape loading. This is very tricky because of the way the OS uses interrupts to receive each byte from the serial system. It’s not just a matter of hooking a single ROM routine as it is on, for example, the Spectrum.