b2 - new emulator

[tom_seddon]

I've fixed the damaged program issue, hopefully, and there's a new release on GitHub. To run it, right-click or ctrl+click the app and select Open... from the menu. When macOS warns you that Apple cannot check it for malicious software, select Open. This setting gets remembered per app, so you won't need to do it again until you download a different version of b2.

There's nothing about this in the docs just yet, but I'll update them.

--Tom

P.S. regarding notarization, I'm probably not going to pursue this in the end - you can only do this if you're a registered developer, something that incurs an annual fee

[Sazhen86]

Out of curiosity I built b2 for Apple silicon and it mostly works, well at least it runs SugarSmash OK. One issue I have is that the message windows don't clear automatically like they do on the intel build. If I clear the first message manually using the tools menu I am left with a small, empty imgui window in the centre of the screen. When I get some time, I'll have a poke around the code and see if I can work out what's going on.

[tom_seddon]

Out of curiosity I built b2 for Apple silicon and it mostly works, well at least it runs SugarSmash OK. One issue I have is that the message windows don't clear automatically like they do on the intel build. If I clear the first message manually using the tools menu I am left with a small, empty imgui window in the centre of the screen. When I get some time, I'll have a poke around the code and see if I can work out what's going on.

Excellent, thank you for trying it out - I don't have appropriate hardware yet!

There's an open issue about Apple Silicon compatibility that mentions a couple of defines: https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/207 - stuff you may already have looked at while getting it working. I don't think there's much that keys off the CPU_ defines anyway.

The recent messages window (and the LEDs popup) is handled in BeebWindow::DoPopupUI. The MessageList object it reads the messages from is supposed to be thread safe, but it's possible I've just got lucky because of the x64 memory model.

--Tom

[Sazhen86]

Hi Tom
Thanks for the pointers. A little debugging later shows that the issue is due to the timing metrics on m1 being different to intel.

On intel 1 tick = 1ns whereas on m1 1 tick = 41.6667ns.

The code to get the ticks per second should probably be as follows:

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        g_timebase_ticks_per_sec = (uint64_t)  1000000000ull / (tbi.numer / tbi.denom);

That change makes the message window and LED windows go away after the correct time.

I'll do some more testing to see if it runs some of the more tricky games and demos correctly. It's currently running BeebStep OK.

[mik]

Liking this emulator on my Mac. I'm enjoying going through all my old floppy images and seeing what code I was writing 30/40 years ago (not much of any value apparently!)

It seems that "Copy BASIC listing" isn't working though. Is it just me or is something broken?

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Failed to copy to clipboard: Couldn't create NSString; is your string data in UTF-8 format?

I'd like to extract some code so I can edit it externally to the emulator. How did I ever write code of any complexity using only MODE 7 and the COPY key?

[tom_seddon]

Liking this emulator on my Mac. I'm enjoying going through all my old floppy images and seeing what code I was writing 30/40 years ago (not much of any value apparently!)

It seems that "Copy BASIC listing" isn't working though. Is it just me or is something broken?

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Failed to copy to clipboard: Couldn't create NSString; is your string data in UTF-8 format?

I'd like to extract some code so I can edit it externally to the emulator. How did I ever write code of any complexity using only MODE 7 and the COPY key?

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you've enjoyed using b2. I also wonder how I ever managed back in the day with the primitive facilities

Are you having problems with all listings, or is this only with specific programs? From a quick skim through the code to remind myself what it does, it looks like it might go wrong if you've got embedded control codes in strings or REMs... I'll need to figure out what to do about that.

£ on the BBC will probably come out as ` in the pasted text too, which would be nice to fix.

I'll have a proper look at this in the next week or two, hopefully. I've added a GitHub issue to track it, so it won't get forgotten: https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/230

--Tom

[ChrisB]

I'm getting a crash on startup of the debug version. Normal version runs just fine - event viewer gives the following:
Faulting application name: b2_Debug.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x62ea6c94
Faulting module name: b2_Debug.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x62ea6c94
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000088982
Faulting process ID: 0x0x978
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1D916EEFB1221B8
Faulting application path: C:\BBC\b2\b2_Debug.exe
Faulting module path: C:\BBC\b2\b2_Debug.exe
Report ID: f778ebdc-f213-4456-9775-9068ab67e16a
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Version 20220803-132314-6a7ed04
Running on Windows 11.

Any idea what's going on?

[tom_seddon]

I'm getting a crash on startup of the debug version. Normal version runs just fine - event viewer gives the following:
Faulting application name: b2_Debug.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x62ea6c94
Faulting module name: b2_Debug.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x62ea6c94
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000088982
Faulting process ID: 0x0x978
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1D916EEFB1221B8
Faulting application path: C:\BBC\b2\b2_Debug.exe
Faulting module path: C:\BBC\b2\b2_Debug.exe
Report ID: f778ebdc-f213-4456-9775-9068ab67e16a
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Version 20220803-132314-6a7ed04
Running on Windows 11.

Any idea what's going on?

I've got none (yet) I'm afraid! - after trying various things, I couldn't get anything surprising to happen. Assuming I've found the right bit of code, it's not obvious what would go wrong. The trace code in general hasn't changed much since I first wrote it.

What are the exact steps you're following?

Thanks,

--Tom

P.S. I do need to improve my ability to investigate surprise crashes like this! - https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/240

[ChrisB]

What are the exact steps you're following?

Simply double click the file to run - Window displays briefly (<.5 seconds) half a starting tone - and then exits with no further error messages. The non-debug version starts fine.

[tom_seddon]

What are the exact steps you're following?

Simply double click the file to run - Window displays briefly (<.5 seconds) half a starting tone - and then exits with no further error messages. The non-debug version starts fine.

Thanks for the reply. I must admit: I still have no idea, and unfortunately I don't have any hardware capable of running Windows 11. (All of our clients at work are avoiding it too, so we're still running Windows 10 there as well. My work PC can't run Windows 11 anyway, as it is <checks calendar> 3 years old.)

But I am going to release a new version very soon, and I've hopefully sorted out keeping the debug info for this and any subsequent versions. So if this new version doesn't work either, which is quite possible, there'll be hopefully a bit more scope for figuring out what's wrong.

--Tom

[Sazhen86]

To add another data point, I tried running both b2 and b2_Debug on my Windows 11(22H2) PC and both worked as expected. Thinking it may be something to do with installed components, I installed Windows 11 Pro 21H1 in a VM and that clean install ran both b2 and b2_Debug as well. So it doesn't look like it's an issue that exists with all Windows 11 installations.

I was rather hoping that it would abend so I could see if I could find out why, but alas, it worked fine.

[EdwardianDuck]

Just a random thought. How hard would it be to provide a configuration option for the font size for the application menus? While they are readable on a laptop screen per the picture below, if one is using a 4K screen they are really hard to read and selecting the desired option can be tricky.

Jeremy

[ChrisB]

But I am going to release a new version very soon, and I've hopefully sorted out keeping the debug info for this and any subsequent versions. So if this new version doesn't work either, which is quite possible, there'll be hopefully a bit more scope for figuring out what's wrong.

Thanks for looking Tom. I'll check out the new version when it drops. If you wanted m to run a version with debug turned up to 11 to see where it's having a problem then I'd be glad to do that.

[tom_seddon]

Just a random thought. How hard would it be to provide a configuration option for the font size for the application menus? While they are readable on a laptop screen per the picture below, if one is using a 4K screen they are really hard to read and selecting the desired option can be tricky.

That's a good idea. I'll have a poke about and see what I can do. (It might be nice to allow changing the UI font anyway. The default is perfectly readable, but the pixelly monospaced look might not be to all tastes.)

Which OS are you using? On Windows and macOS, b2 is _supposed_ to advertise itself as non-high DPI supporting, so if the OS widgets look the right size then (in theory...) the OS should be scaling the b2 display as well. This seems to work on my high-DPI Mac, both in macOS and Windows, but it's not a very large sample set.

No harm in having the option though. And I have no idea what Linux does.

Thanks,

--Tom

P.S. GitHub issue for this: https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/242

[tom_seddon]

To add another data point, I tried running both b2 and b2_Debug on my Windows 11(22H2) PC and both worked as expected. Thinking it may be something to do with installed components, I installed Windows 11 Pro 21H1 in a VM and that clean install ran both b2 and b2_Debug as well. So it doesn't look like it's an issue that exists with all Windows 11 installations.

I was rather hoping that it would abend so I could see if I could find out why, but alas, it worked fine.

Excellent, thank you for trying it - that eliminates the possibility of complete Windows 11 incompatibility!

Thanks for looking Tom. I'll check out the new version when it drops. If you wanted m to run a version with debug turned up to 11 to see where it's having a problem then I'd be glad to do that.

New b2: https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/releas ... 26-24c745f

One thing that might be worth trying: take a backup of everything in "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\b2", then delete it, then run again. Does it work then? If it does, please send me the files and I'll see if I get the same here. It's supposed to be impossible for b2 to mess up its own config, but it might not be as impossible as I'd hoped. (The files shouldn't contain any non-b2 information, but they are text so you can see exactly what's in them.)

b2's logging isn't great, so for getting more info I'm going to have a go at making b2 write out a Windows crash dump if it crashes. This will hopefully prove generally useful anyway!

Thanks,

--Tom

[EdwardianDuck]

Which OS are you using?

I'm running macOS Ventura 13.1 on an M1 Mac Studio. The display is set to "more space", so that is the native resolution of the 4K screen. The only way to make the menu text more readable is change the display setting to "larger text", but on a Mac that just reduces the resolution of the screen rather than scaling the font. Personally, I'm not bothered about the font style, the monospaced pixelly font is fine, it's just the size I'm struggling with a bit. Even that's not really a problem, I can just change the screen resolution to work round it. Or I can just use the my MacBook Pro.

On my old (2014) MacBook Pro the default display is scaled for the internal display, so the font size is fine. If in increase the display to the maximum resolution of the panel, it is again rather small.

Jeremy

[garfield]

--Tom

Just a by-the-by note to you Tom that b2 is a fab emulator. I really like the debug features... particularly the tracing dumps.

[ChrisB]

OK - success. I deleted the profile files and let it recreate them which then worked. Looking at the config I hadn't changed much. However I did notice that the "Emulate interlace" was turned off. Sure enough trying to enable this in the debug version (but not the main version) caused a crash as soon as it is clicked.

The good news is that the new version does not do this and I can enable interlace emulation and both debug and normal run as expected without issue.

[tom_seddon]

OK - success. I deleted the profile files and let it recreate them which then worked. Looking at the config I hadn't changed much. However I did notice that the "Emulate interlace" was turned off. Sure enough trying to enable this in the debug version (but not the main version) caused a crash as soon as it is clicked.

The good news is that the new version does not do this and I can enable interlace emulation and both debug and normal run as expected without issue.

Ah-hah - that would explain it, thank you for the response. I've had to fix this more than once: see https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/144. I'm not even sure how it came back after the first time, but it needed fixing twice again after that - anyway, I'll try not to put it back in again!

(With the immediate issue fixed. I've put the crash dump business on the back burner for now. But it remains an open issue: https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/243)

--Tom

[garfield]

--Tom

I just tried the new drop of b2. File association (on Windows) is a small but very welcome addition!

I think Visual Studio Code + BeebAsm assembler + b2 is going to become my default toolchain now.

Thanks again Tom for this release.

[garfield]

.
Joystick is working well. Tried it with my 8BitDo Pro 2 controller:

I have an idea for a feature request... it would be nice to have a "BBC keyboard to XInput controller" mapping mode. This would pop up a dialog window where you could map (on a per-diskette basis) BBC keystrokes to buttons on your Windows (or Mac) game controller. This would allow games that did not have native joystick support to suddenly have support.

As an example, a BBC game that hardcodes "leftward" to the 'Z' key could be used by specifying that 'Z' keypress is mapped to 'left' on the D-Pad (or analogue stick) on the Windows game controller. Even combinations such as 'Shift-Break' could be mapped to the START button on the controller, et cetera.

Just a thought. Let me know if this idea is best added to the Github backlog...

[tom_seddon]

I have an idea for a feature request... it would be nice to have a "BBC keyboard to XInput controller" mapping mode. This would pop up a dialog window where you could map (on a per-diskette basis) BBC keystrokes to buttons on your Windows (or Mac) game controller. This would allow games that did not have native joystick support to suddenly have support.

That's a good idea, and disk-specific configs could be useful for the keyboard mapping and machine type, too. This could be something that File > Run could do for you automatically, perhaps, and same when you use the file association mechanism.

--Tom

[garfield]

I have an idea for a feature request... it would be nice to have a "BBC keyboard to XInput controller" mapping mode. This would pop up a dialog window where you could map (on a per-diskette basis) BBC keystrokes to buttons on your Windows (or Mac) game controller. This would allow games that did not have native joystick support to suddenly have support.

That's a good idea, and disk-specific configs could be useful for the keyboard mapping and machine type, too. This could be something that File > Run could do for you automatically, perhaps, and same when you use the file association mechanism.

--Tom

Yes, you're right... for machine type too would be useful.

[Rob_hawk]

Hey Tom,

I trust all is well and you've had a great start to the new year...

It was great to see the joystick support added recently. Do you have any plans to be able to include the "Retronicdesign.com" version 3 joystick adapter? It's a great piece of kit that I use across other platforms.

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b2 - BBC Micro B/B+/Master 128 emulator - 20221229-183226-24c745f
HTTP server listening on port 48075 (0xbbcb)
Timing method: vsync
Renderer: opengl, 736x576 SDL_PIXELFORMAT_ARGB8888
Sound: coreaudio, 48000Hz 1-channel (4096 byte buffer)
Not a supported game controller: retronicdesign.com Retro Joystick Adapter v3.0

Look forward to news.

Big thanks - Regards

Rob

[tom_seddon]

It was great to see the joystick support added recently. Do you have any plans to be able to include the "Retronicdesign.com" version 3 joystick adapter? It's a great piece of kit that I use across other platforms.

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the report, and sorry it's not working! I do intend to improve the support for SDL2 game controller mappings, so that you can have it load existing game controller database entries, or add new game controller types yourself. (See, e.g., https://github.com/gabomdq/SDL_GameControllerDB.) Hopefully this will make it possible to support most types of game controller or joystick in some fashion. Feels like this would provide a good return on effort expended, so I hope to look at this fairly soon.

(Looks like Steam also has some functionality for doing this, and b2 might be able to work with that too.)

The game controller mappings system does assume you're using an Xbox-/Playstation-style game controller, so each gamepad's analogue sticks and d-pad map to the Beeb analogue channels (in a way that would match a joystick), and its buttons map to the Beeb joystick button. But longer term, I would like to provide a more flexible joystick configuration mechanism, a bit like the current keyboard mapping system, that would let you map anything on your joystick (axis, POV hat, button, trackball...) to any of the Beeb analogue channels or joystick buttons.

--Tom

[Rob_hawk]

Hi Tom,

Great to hear from you and thanks for the quick reply. Sounds like this would be a great addition to B2 going forward. B2 is the emulator that I use the most for learning to program on when away from home but occasionally I use VICE (C64), FS-UAE (Amiga) and CSPECT (Spectrum Next) and these somehow pick up the Retronics adapter that I use. Perhaps these other emulators use the method you are considering as well.

I’ll look forward to news as and when things happen. It’s really great to use B2 on OSX knowing that it’s still being developed and maintained in a high quality and caring way.

Regards

Rob

[tom_seddon]

Great to hear from you and thanks for the quick reply. Sounds like this would be a great addition to B2 going forward. B2 is the emulator that I use the most for learning to program on when away from home but occasionally I use VICE (C64), FS-UAE (Amiga) and CSPECT (Spectrum Next) and these somehow pick up the Retronics adapter that I use. Perhaps these other emulators use the method you are considering as well.

I’ll look forward to news as and when things happen. It’s really great to use B2 on OSX knowing that it’s still being developed and maintained in a high quality and caring way.

I was looking at this today. Something you could try already, I think, is to use this SDL gamepad mapper tool: https://gitlab.com/ryochan7/sdl2-gamepa ... -/releases - hopefully if you configure the gamepad, then use the Set Mapping as Environmental Variable button, b2 should pick it up on the next run.

(I don't have any way of testing this currently, but I think I've got a USB gamepad somewhere that's hopefully old enough to be normally unrecognised...)

The next version of b2 will load the game controller database I mentioned, which will be supplied in the distribution. No guarantees this will support any specific controller, but it will support a wider range of them at least.

--Tom

P.S. The gamepad mapper tool lets you copy controller configs to the clipboard too - when I get round to doing a fancier joystick UI, I'll add in some support for this. So if you want to use more than one type of custom controller, you'll be able to do that

[Rob_hawk]

The next version of b2 will load the game controller database I mentioned, which will be supplied in the distribution. No guarantees this will support any specific controller, but it will support a wider range of them at least.

Sorry for the delayed reply Tom. A busy week. When I get back to base I’ll have a play with the option but am more than happy to wait for the next official b2 release with the game controller database. I think that will be a fantastic addition.

Look forward to news and thanks again for b2 and the support!

Rob

[Yrrah2]

I was looking at this today. Something you could try already, I think, is to use this SDL gamepad mapper tool: https://gitlab.com/ryochan7/sdl2-gamepa ... -/releases - hopefully if you configure the gamepad, then use the Set Mapping as Environmental Variable button, b2 should pick it up on the next run.

(I don't have any way of testing this currently, but I think I've got a USB gamepad somewhere that's hopefully old enough to be normally unrecognised...)

The next version of b2 will load the game controller database I mentioned, which will be supplied in the distribution. No guarantees this will support any specific controller, but it will support a wider range of them at least.

--Tom

P.S. The gamepad mapper tool lets you copy controller configs to the clipboard too - when I get round to doing a fancier joystick UI, I'll add in some support for this. So if you want to use more than one type of custom controller, you'll be able to do that

Are you going to support game controllers only?
I have a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Joystick, and is not really a game controller, or is it. (b2 sees the joystick, but says it's not supported)
Is the SDL a universal game controller/joystick system so that you can use any controller/joystick?
And are you planning that you can program the buttons in b2 to certain fonctions?
(sorry if I'm asking a silly question, not much of a programmer)

Are you planning to support ROMs that are bigger than 16k?
InterWord, QuestPaint, MasterROM and other programs have bigger roms and can basically not be loaded in an emulator.
Would be nice that a dump of a bigger ROM can be loaded into b2.

Koen

[tom_seddon]

Are you going to support game controllers only?
I have a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Joystick, and is not really a game controller, or is it. (b2 sees the joystick, but says it's not supported)
Is the SDL a universal game controller/joystick system so that you can use any controller/joystick?

I believe in principle you can use any joystick - I don't have any to test it with though. But the gamepad mapper tool I mentioned will hopefully let you specify which joystick controls map to the game controller controls. Please let me know if you try this, as I'd be interested to know whether it works, so I can update the docs (if it works) or try to fix it (if it doesn't).

(I will probably be leaning on tools like this, rather than trying to reproduce this stuff in the b2 UI.)

And are you planning that you can program the buttons in b2 to certain fonctions?

This would be a longer-term thing. It would be nice to have all the input unified, so you can map any PC input to any BBC input (or emulator command), but for now PC game controllers map to BBC joysticks and PC keys map to BBC keys. This is just me not planning ahead enough when writing the code, sorry about that.

Are you planning to support ROMs that are bigger than 16k?
InterWord, QuestPaint, MasterROM and other programs have bigger roms and can basically not be loaded in an emulator.
Would be nice that a dump of a bigger ROM can be loaded into b2.

Ahh, good idea... I hadn't thought of that! I've added it to the list of things that aren't emulated yet (but should be): https://github.com/tom-seddon/b2/issues/14

--Tom