The Sinclair QL Forum

Peter was suggesting that there might be a problem with the timing of reading and writing to registers... although I don't
know what I could do about that as I have already had to rewrite the Verilog state engine to make it exactly 68008 timing in
order to get it reading RAM reliably, I don't ...

XorA wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 10:35 am My emulator is based on Mushashi and boots Minerva fine.

That's good. Which of your emulators use Musashi, as you are maintaining several?

Funny you should mention Minerva, as I get a perfect boot up to the F1 F2 screen with a JS ROM, but Minerva goes a bit wonky, I think it has a very different RAM test procedure...

Minerva is also more demanding in terms of correctness of the CPU emulation.
I would not take for granted that ...

I know writing to the screen register is working as I can change between mode 4 and mode 8 and turn the screen off. This means my read and write mapping is ok.

But it does not necessarily mean all timings (and delays between accesses) are okay for all registers involved.
I think your problem at ...

Okay, the microdrives are point I understand. For me they always were good riddance and unused for over 30 years, so I didn't consider.

It would probably not too hard to make microdrive work on a Pi connected to GPIO port. If someone was particularly driven!

One could use a kernel with ...

bwinkel67 wrote: Fri Jul 11, 2025 10:53 pm I also think there is a slight difference between the emulation in a PiStorm and a software emulator written for Windows or Linux, isn't there?

This project is a software emulator for Linux, and depending on the underlying Linux OS.

If I remember correctly, there was mention of the GPIO sitting behind PCIe making things difficult. I have little doubt it will somehow be doable - but when the much more active Amiga scene has not accomplished it yet, that certainly sounds like much work.

Hi Will, I hope I didn't come across negative - I have a lot of respect for your technical achievement.
I know that software emulator can do a lot more than the original QL - and that is of course still true if it is mounted inside the QL.

Hi Peter, for me what makes the QL PiStorm a better option ...

C68 has options (as Lattice C) to produce reentrant code. But there is (IMO) not even a startup object file/lib to use it and no libraries.

No, it does not require specific options or startup. I used reentrant code intensively when working on multitasking-capable internet stuff. Of course the ...

For me, it remains somewhat unclear what makes the Musashi emulator under Linux preferrable to sQLux.
But as a technical achievement, this is impressive work. Thanks for the update!
Fortunately QL interrupts are autovector. I'm curious if SuperBASIC will run after the implementation.