Bbc Micro Emulation

[bunny]

For anyone just wondering which of the four BBC Micro emulators in the archive to get: you want BeebEm v0.6, which has dealt well with everything I've thrown at it, from Snapper to (with the "nudge CRT" setting) Firetrack. Clearly it's nowhere near as full-featured as recent PC versions of BeebEm -- you can't run Master software, for example -- but that's not really a problem as only a small number of Beeb games need more than the standard 32K Model B that the GP2X port emulates anyway.

What's particularly nice is how good the screen looks in every mode. Even in Mode 0 (which on the Beeb is 640x256 pixels) text is perfectly legible. There's no documentation with this version of BeebEm, but that doesn't really matter once you know that Start brings up the virtual keyboard and from there Select brings up the main menu. The keyboard does take up most of the screen, so a transparent one might have been handy, but that's only really a problem in text-based games such as text adventures.

Really, there's very little wrong with this emulator, and what is wrong is minor: the opaque keyboard, the (very common) misspelling of "asterisk" as "asterix" -- that sort of thing. The Beeb is my favourite retro system (I have a Model B Plus myself) and I think this emulator does it justice.

 

[Parkydr]

I use BeebEm too, great for playing Imogen.

 

[bunny]

I use BeebEm too, great for playing Imogen.

Underrated game, that, though it always struck me as a bit weird to have a (male) wizard called Imogen!

And of course, without Acorn there would have been no ARM, so the Beeb has its small part in the GP2X's ancestry as well...