Emu48 25 Years Anniversary (1997 ... 2022)

[compsystems]

exes
https://hp.giesselink.com/emu48.htm


Source https://hp.giesselink.com/25ann48.htm

Where are the spirits that I called?

With the beeper emulation the ROM beep patches became obsolete, what about the remaining patch code? The first step of course was removing the beep patches from the KML scripts. But these are only a few scripts that I control, what about the plenty of other KML script distributions? Disable the ROM patch ability in general? Not a good idea I think, so I develop a method checking the ROM for the beep patches at the known patch positions. If found such a beep patch I added a warning in the KML Compilation Result dialog. The next escalation step was confirming the warning in the KML Compilation Result dialog and finally the error in the KML dialog. With this final step the beep patch code had been removed from the source code.

added PNG support for background image
As alternative the user can now use PNG instead of BMP or GIF files for the background picture. This allow file compression on true color images reducing the necessary disk space. The transparent feature of PNG files with the alpha channel is not supported.

New opcodes
New opcodes after 20 years of development? An attentive reader of the Clarke chip document recognized that some gaps in the Saturn opcode table are described in this document. Some of these "gap opcodes" don't execute a NOP (No OPeration) like expected, these are copies of already known opcodes. Verifying these new opcodes on real calculators show that these opcodes are implemented as described in the Clarke document and the execution of these opcodes on Emu48 are failing. So someone could create a program that is only working on real hardware, a not acceptable situation. In consequence Emu48 and all derived emulators got an opcode decoding update knowing these new opcodes also.

Opcode trace capability
Over the years Emu48 had only the possibility to have a look at the last 255 executed CPU opcodes. Too less for some situations, so the Emu48 debugger got the possibility to write the executed opcodes as disassembled code into a file. This way is only limited by the file size and the tools to explore such a file.

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Thank you to CG for 25 years of development.
What is emu48 missing?
Add the option to duplicate LCD, a common feature of other emulators, this way you can do from LCD only zoom and other features that are displayed in the following CASIO fx-CG emulator