Should Have Gone To Xspect Savers!

I'm an old-time ZX Spectrum owner from 1982 and since it was the machine's 30th birthday just last week I figured it's mandatory to run an emulator on every Mac of mine, including my cranky, old, 600MHz Xubuntu-running G3 iBook. I had no idea how much effort would be involved!

For lots of more modern systems it's just pretty easy to install FUSE, the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator; but it's not readily available as a package for my iBook, so I had to recompile it, and when I did: for the SDL library and then just for plain X I found it would crash with an 'illegal instruction' message before doing anything.

My overall impression of compiling FUSE though was of the immensity of the work involved, and the size of the code, the download expands to 10.3Mb and then I needed SDL at a whopping 29.8Mb - you can't get much more simple than that eh!?

And of course, in the end it didn't work.

However, I managed to find an alternative: Spectemu-X11, which wonderfully I could download as a package for my machine. Unfortunately, that too didn't quite work - on my iBook I found that I couldn't generate a Symbol Shift since the keyboard didn't support the Right-Shift key-code. So, then I downloaded the source (which when expanded and compiled uses 1.7Mb, almost small!) plus the diff for the 0.94a-9 version; and then had to learn how to apply the diff to a folder: place the diff file in the root directory of the package (in my case just inside my spectemu-0.94 folder) and then type patch -p1 < theNameOfThePatchFile.diff 

And it did it!

Then I compiled SpectEmu, which it duly did and left me with the same problem, no Symbol Shift. So I did some tracking on why that's the case. It's entirely due to the key codes defined in spkey_p.h. The definition for Symbol Shift is derived from SK_Shift_R which is:

#define SK_Shift_R        0xFFE2    /* Right shift */

With a bit of debugging I found out that the command key on my Mac generated 0xFFEB, so all I had to do was replace the above line with:

#define SK_Shift_R        0xFFEB    /* Right shift */

touch all the files that #include spkey_p.h and then make it again. Easy, and now I have a Spectrum Emulator on my lowly (but lovely) iBook!

Next, back to working on my own project, the FIGnition DIY 8-bit computer!