Yeah, the LCD is tiny at 2.4", and the emulation runs about 15% slower than an NTSC C64. But it's running on a small embedded board that's available for under $30 US (DigiKey, Mouser, ...) including mounted LCD display and USB OTG jack. Just add keyboard, OTG USB adapter, and power supply.
This is a port of my portable C64/6502 emulator for terminal console, which was a port of my Commodore/6502 emulator for Windows Console. But this time, I dropped the console part, and went for real video (LCD) and USB keyboard support. Hello PETSCII!
Keyboard mapping (showing my Dell keyboard):
STOP(ESC) F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 Restore(PrtScr/SysRq) Run/Stop(Pause/Break)
1! 2@ 3# 4$ 5% 6^ 7& 8* 9( 0) -_ += Del/Ins(Back) Ins Hme/Clr / * -
Ctrl(Tab) Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ] £ (\) Del 7 8 9 +
A S D F G H J K L ;: '" Return(ENTER) 4 5 6
LShift Z X C V B N M ,< .> /? RShift Up 1 2 3
C=(Ctrl) SPACEBAR C=(Ctrl) Lft Down Rt 0 . Enter
Features:
- 320x200 text screen on graphics LCD, with top/bottom border.
- USB Keyboard (e.g. PC-103) support (symbolic, not positional)
- Tab maps to C64 Ctrl key
- Ctlr maps to C64 Commodore key
- Esc key maps to C64 RUN/STOP key
- PrtScr/SysRq maps to C64 RESTORE key (supports STOP+RESTORE)
- PgUp also maps to C64 RESTORE key
- Full 6502 emulation. Go ahead, run some machine language on it.
- Commodore character set
- Text video at $0400 (address 1024)
- Text color at $D800 (address 55296)
- Keyboard scan by writing to $DC00, reading from $DC01
- Full 64K RAM. Update 2020-04-14: RAM/ROM/IO/Charset banking is implemented! And 1K color nybbles
- 1/60 second IRQ. So we've got the software clock: TI, TI$
- Upper/lower case switch ($D018), and reverse characters.
- Border color ($D020) and background color ($D021).
Limitations:
- Approximately 85% cpu speed of a real C64
No NMI. No Restore key.Update 2020-04-15: implemented, see keyboard above.- No other device support. No tape, no disk, no serial, no cartridges, no joysticks, no printer.
- VIC-II support is limited to getting system booted.
- No full register support.
- Text address can't be moved.
- No graphics support.
- No programmable characters.
- No raster interrupts.
- No sprites.
- No left/right side border displayed. Ran out of pixels.
- No CIA1/CIA2 (except for keyboard data ports, but no data direction registers)
- No SID.
- In progress. There are bugs lurking (for example, the IRQ and USB keyboard stops working exactly at 35 minutes, 38 seconds from start, maybe a resource leak in third party libraries, so we'll call that time limited I guess)
- Keyboard support may need tweaks for more complete PETSCII key support
- No CAPS LOCK or SHIFT LOCK supported
- Doesn't utilize full capabilities of the STM32F429 MCU and discovery board components including 2.0MB of Flash (uses 110KB), 256KB of RAM (uses 83KB), 8MB SDRAM, motion sensor, user leds, user button, or other expansion capabilities. Opportunity awaits!
Links:
- Source on mbed.com (utilizes MBED OS, MBED USBHOST, ST429 BSP)
- Terminal Console related C64/6502 emulator source on github.com
- Binary firmware (yes you can flash and try right now if you have the hardware)
- ST-Link Utility (flash utility for STM32, programmer built into discovery board)
- STM32F429x Datasheet
- STM32F429IDISCOVERY resources at st.com
Credit:
- Something similar has been done before (but not source related). See hackaday.com.
- Thanks to STMicroelectronics for the cool development board!
