EightyOne - time to bring it up to date?

[Spirantho]

Hi everybody,

As you may have noticed there are occasional flaws in the EightyOne emulation which prevent it being very useful, at least for me (as I want to program the AY chip which EightyOne doesn't emulate correctly and the sound is rather dodgy at the best of times).

I heard that Mike who wrote EightyOne has basically disappeared, so should we take a look at maintaining it ourselves? The biggest problem is that he's used C++ Builder, so it needs porting to a more friendly development environment - no small feat.

Should we do this? Without a maintainer EightyOne will surely die as I can't imagine it'll stay compatible to Windows for too long given the way Microsoft are going at breaking things with new releases (especially as Borland is often a bit iffy)?

Any thoughts? Can anyone ask Mike what he thinks? I don't want to steal his project off him nor take credit for his work but at the same time I'd hate to see it die....

[XavSnap]

The release -1a- is the final release !

And it's a wonderfull emulator.

[BrunoFlorindo]

Nvm...

[sirmorris]

I did some development work on EO and have a build environment on a virtual machine. I've mailed Mike to see if he minds his project taking up a life of its own.

While EO is a brilliant emulator its development was very organic. I think if anyone was to take up development it should be so that the components are reorganised and the painful borland environment is ditched.

A vanilla C++ implementation for one of the free visual studio tools should be the first step IMHO.

C

[gus]

HI,
Well I think that the new ZX81 emulator MUST be developed with GNU Tools, and of course run not only on Window$

Gus

[burnttoy]

There's Qt Creator. http://qt.nokia.com/developer/qt-creator-1.3-preview

I've been using it on Mac OS X and Windows (7 in fact). So far, priddy good. Hasn't fallen over on me yet and the code editor is very nice. Integrated forms and portable to Linux, Mac, Windows plus lots of variants and S60 etc. Haven't used it for Linux or S60.

Even without the IDE (Creator) Qt is probably worth considering.

I even made a half arsed attempt at getting the Z80 core from EightyOne building but there's a ton of work to do.

burnttoy

[Mike]

Yes I'm still alive

I think it's a good idea to bring EO up to date - I might even be able to help a little...

I can confirm it works well on Windows 7 64 bit already

Mike

PS. I like the word organic lol

[sirmorris]

It pays to choose words wisely Nice to see you Mike.

How did you get on with the changes you were making last time we spoke? You were changing the timing to sync with dsound, or something like that?

[Mike]

Hi sm.

I'll email you later...

Mike

[XavSnap]

Hi Mike,
Happy to read you !

Could you fix the drag & drop problème, while you want to start a "P" file with Win associations.
You had to fix the BMP default path name in the EO root directory !
Eo isn't able to find this file in case of use a different "P" directory...
Thanks a lot for EO.
Have fun.