Xbeeb

Xbeeb 0.4.1 is now released!

Xbeeb is a BBC Model B Micro Emulator for UNIX and the X Window system. At the moment (release 0.4.1) it implements a significant amount of the functionality of the original machine, but is not complete. Things I have done are :

• MODE 7 and bitmapped screen emulation
• Teletext fonts
• full 6502 emulation
• near complete 6522 emulation
• near complete keyboard emulation. The only problems here are the BBC keys which don't match up with a standard PC-style keyboard.
• paged ROM/RAM support
• support for an emulated filing system
• Sound

Things which I know are missing but which I'm not currently working on are :

• Serial IO
• ADC converter
• Econet
• FRED and JIM memory-mapped IO
• the Tube
• the User VIA (implemented, but doesn't do anything)

I've got a few questions I need answering before I can progress with some of these. If you can answer anything, I'd like to hear from you.

If you're a Beeb user, you know what it looks like, but here are a few screenshots from some games.

Sources for version 0.4.1 are available from our archive site : ftp://ftp.cloud9.co.uk/pub/Micros/BBC/Emulators/Xbeeb/xbeeb-0.4.1.tar.gz.

One of the things that people always seem to ask about is how fast the emulator is. On my no-name PIII-733 running Linux Xbeeb v0.4.1 will run up to 20 times faster than a real Beeb. Unfortunately this performance isn't maintained when there are lots of MODE2 screen updates do to or when the emulator has to play a lot of sounds.

Mark Cooke used to keep some Beeb related archives at http://blue.bad.bris.ac.uk/students/ee2015/Welcome.html, but that seems to have disappeared. I have a patchy mirror of what was available there that I'm presently trying to reconstruct.