Author:Alfred E. Heggestad

Date:March 2000

Version:1.0

E32Frodo

intro

e32frodo.intro

Frodo is a Commodore 64 emulator written by Christian Bauer for Amiga, and ported to Epoc32 by Jal Panvel & Alfred E. Heggestad in the period Nov. 1999 to Jan 2000.

Frodo is also ported to many other platforms, inluding Win32, Unix, Linux, BeOS, etc.

Frodo is free, and the source code is free. You are welcome to edit and improve this piece of software if you have a need for it. Look in References at the bottom for more info.

Feedback to edmund@roland.org

 

quick start: loading a game

e32frodo.quick

The first thing you probably will do when you try this emulator is to play a game. Frodo supports .D64 and .T64 file formats. A .D64 file is the equivalent of a 1541 disk.

  1. Get a .D64 file and put in e.g. C:\c64\FILE.D64
  2. Launch Prefs dialog
  3. Type in the name FILE.D64 in Drive8 in 1541 part of Prefs. (including path)
  4. Now type LOAD"$",8 in your C64
  5. After loading, type LIST
  6. The content of the disk will now be printed on the screen. Choose on file and type LOAD"GAME",8
  7. Type RUN
  8. There you GO!

See Joystick section for how to use Joysticks. More help on how to use the C64 is not provided here. If you don’t know anything about the original machine it’s probably waste of time to do something cool here (except play games...)

 

buttons and screen

e32frodo.buttons

There are four buttons on the toolbar:

spd shows the actual speed of the C64 and max shows max speed for this session

 

keyboard

e32frodo.keyboard

The keyboard is emulated in a very special way. Some keys on the good old C64 does not exist on a standard EPOC machine. But most of the keys should be present anyway.

All alphanumeric keys are mapped to their equivalents on the EPOC machine.

special keys:

Cbm: EPOC:

! Shift+1

" Shift+2

# Fn+2

$ Shift+4

% Shift+5

& Shift+7

' '

( Fn+7

) Fn+8

+ Fn+I

- Fn+O

£ Shift+3

HOM Fn+LeftArrow

CLR Sh+Fn+LArrow

DEL Del

INST Shift+Del

[ Shift+9

] Shift+0

= Fn+P

< Fn+5

> Fn+6

? Shift+.

^ Shift+6 (^)

<- Fn+1

@ Fn+4

* Shift+8

space space

R/S Escape

: Fn+'

; Fn+L

CBM TAB

You can also use the hot keys on the Function keys:

function keys:

F1 Fn+A LIST

F2 Fn+S Clear screen

F2 Fn+D RUN

F3 Fn+F SYS4096*12

F4 Fn+G LOAD"

F5 Fn+H SAVE"

F6 Fn+J LOAD"$",8

F7 Fn+K CLEAR...(?)

You may experience some strange things when typing fast, that’s because the keyboard handling is not implemented in the best way. You are welcome to improve this if you want.

 

joystick

e32frodo.joystick

Joysticks are necessary to play games. In this version there are only keyboard emulation of joysticks. To enable them, you must select Joystick on in the Prefs Dialog and turn on Caps Lock. (Fn+Tab on Series5)

The arrow keys and space will then work as a joystick for both the Joysticks.

In the future there will also be support for real Joysticks and a JoyPad on the screen.

 

file system

e32frodo.file

The Commodore disk drive 1541 is also emulated here, so you can use it as normal. Up to 4 disk drives may be used, which supports .D64 and .T64 files.

If you have problems loading a file, try switching on the Emul1541Proc in Prefs Dialog.

 

video

e32frodo.video

The VIC chip is emulated and creates a bitmap which is blitted to the screen. Since the Psion Series 5 have only got 16 different levels of grey, I had to rewrite almost the whole VIC chip emulation. There is now support for machines with both 16 and 256 colors, but unfortunately this is hardcoded in emulator. This means that if you have a Psion Series 5, you should go for the 16 colors version, and if you have the Psion netBook you should try the 256 colors version. This will hopefully be merged into one version some time in the future.

If you are not happy with the default colors, you can set them in the frodo.fpr preference file, located under C:\system\apps\e32frodo\data

There are different settings for the 16 colors version and the 256 colors version.

 

sound

e32frodo.sound

Unfortunately there is no support the the lovely sound of SID in this version. The emulation code is included, but I had no time to port this part.

It should be quite easy to enable SID sound, and you are welcome to do it if you feel the need.

 

future improvements

e32frodo.future

There is alot of things to improve here, and new stuff to add. In the future I am planning to add at least:

SID emulation

SAM monitor (debug monitor)

Cycle based instead of Line based emul

External Joystick

Memory Snapshot

File association for .D64 and .T64

CPU meter

IrDA Memory Snapshot Send/Receive

Zoom

Bitmap Snapshot

 

acknowledgements

e32frodo.ack

Thanks to Christian Bauer for writing the original Frodo. Without his source code this project would have taken at least 2 years.

Thanks to all the Beta testers for nice feedback.

Also thanks to: Joe Fitzgerald, Ari Koivisto, Daniel Mattioli, Lasse Saeten, David Sharp, Graham Oldfield, Phillipe Gabrielle

A big thanks to Symbian for creating this powerful platform, EPOC32.

 

references

e32frodo.ref

You can get the complete source from my homepage:

www.edmund.roland.org/e32frodo

Original Frodo’s page:

www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/FRMain.html

Jal’s homepage: www.pansoftware.com