Hard to believe, but it's true!
I was inspired by Gerton Lunter's Z80 (which I had used for years) and I wanted to make my own Spectrum emulator. I probably started it at some point in 1995 and worked on it obsessively for months. V0.0 was released on 02/02/1996 and it would've been seen by hardly anyone. It was written between a 486SX-25 PC and some kind of Sun Microsystems Unix machine at my university. The early releases were X/Unix only, with the unreleased DOS version only existing for home development purposes.
The initial development was done with gcc and aXe on the Unix side and Borland C 3.1 on the DOS side. The DOS version ran in the 16-bit segmented address mode! Later, I dropped the Unix development, as I had literally no useful hardware to keep it up to date. The DOS version moved onto Watcom C, where it was finally compiled in 32-bit mode.
In those early days, the sharing of source code examples was the way you found out how to do things. It wasn't easy to find documents back then or even know the capabilities of the machine you were working on. A lot of people indirectly helped those early releases of X128, with their examples of DOS interrupts, setting a VGA mode, creating an X bitmap window, keyboard handling, interpolating values, using unions, emulating CPUs, etc.
Later versions of X128 became quite popular, with the release of V0.7 - the SAOM version (Special Audio Output Mode) on 21/07/1997. It was the first one capable of playing AY speech and samples properly and was generally not too bad. There were quite a few updates but proper releases ground to a halt with V0.94 on 02/09/2002. At that point, a very long process of constant rewrites took hold, with the first Windows version created in 2003, using Visual Studio 2003 but not widely distributed. During this time it was distributed "on request".
In 2007, Peter Persson ported X128 to the Atari Falcon (68060-equipped).
In 2010, following lots of updates for various video modes, sound chips, SAM Coupe and some Russian models, X128 went to an "open alpha" system where anyone could download it.
Since then, it has been periodically updated with emulation of odd hardware. It will probably continue that way, never getting finished and probably never being tidy enough to make a proper release.
X128 Work-in-Progress page
I was inspired by Gerton Lunter's Z80 (which I had used for years) and I wanted to make my own Spectrum emulator. I probably started it at some point in 1995 and worked on it obsessively for months. V0.0 was released on 02/02/1996 and it would've been seen by hardly anyone. It was written between a 486SX-25 PC and some kind of Sun Microsystems Unix machine at my university. The early releases were X/Unix only, with the unreleased DOS version only existing for home development purposes.
The initial development was done with gcc and aXe on the Unix side and Borland C 3.1 on the DOS side. The DOS version ran in the 16-bit segmented address mode! Later, I dropped the Unix development, as I had literally no useful hardware to keep it up to date. The DOS version moved onto Watcom C, where it was finally compiled in 32-bit mode.
In those early days, the sharing of source code examples was the way you found out how to do things. It wasn't easy to find documents back then or even know the capabilities of the machine you were working on. A lot of people indirectly helped those early releases of X128, with their examples of DOS interrupts, setting a VGA mode, creating an X bitmap window, keyboard handling, interpolating values, using unions, emulating CPUs, etc.
Later versions of X128 became quite popular, with the release of V0.7 - the SAOM version (Special Audio Output Mode) on 21/07/1997. It was the first one capable of playing AY speech and samples properly and was generally not too bad. There were quite a few updates but proper releases ground to a halt with V0.94 on 02/09/2002. At that point, a very long process of constant rewrites took hold, with the first Windows version created in 2003, using Visual Studio 2003 but not widely distributed. During this time it was distributed "on request".
In 2007, Peter Persson ported X128 to the Atari Falcon (68060-equipped).
In 2010, following lots of updates for various video modes, sound chips, SAM Coupe and some Russian models, X128 went to an "open alpha" system where anyone could download it.
Since then, it has been periodically updated with emulation of odd hardware. It will probably continue that way, never getting finished and probably never being tidy enough to make a proper release.
X128 Work-in-Progress page