Thread: BBC Micro
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marnanel's Avatar
Posts: 26 | Thanked: 45 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Philadelphia
#27
I've now put a few minutes into packaging the thing; it's here:

http://people.collabora.co.uk/~tthur...01-1_armel.deb

It works well enough to boot and load discs, but not well enough to do much else. I've turned off AMX (mouse) support and made the main menu come up instead when you tap the screen, because beforehand it came up on F12.

Try this: boot the BBC. Touch the screen. Choose "Discs". Choose "Select, load, and run a disc". Select "welcome.ssd". Press OK. You will be running the Welcome disk.

Note that the default screen size cuts off the bottom of the menus and the screen on the N900, unless you run in fullscreen mode, when it fits exactly. This can be a nuisance, because you might not be able to press the OK button on the menus. See points 3 and 4 below.

Things which fairly urgently need doing with this:

1) I've found copies of Beebem which say they're GPL and copies which say they aren't. I'd like to know for sure when its status changed.

2) Really, I'd like it to download the MOS/BASIC/DFS roms on first boot, to save us having to package them.

3) It would be better if the main window was a GTK window than an SDL window. Then we could put a conventional Hildon menu on it and do away with the tapping-the-screen thing.

4) A screen mode that scaled the BBC's output onto the size of the screen *minus* the titlebar would be very useful.

5) The keyboard setup is a bit crappy at the moment. The N900's alt key doesn't work at all, so you can't type numbers. I meant to have it so that the comma key was a "hyper" key to let you use QWE... as f1, f2, f3... but that seems not to be working at present.

6) It should default to a sensible speed; the current default slows down the BBC too much, making everything sluggish.

7) What I would really like is a menu when you started up which listed a few dozen games, and if you chose one it didn't already have installed it would download it.

8) An onscreen virtual keyboard would be lovely.

Last edited by marnanel; 2010-01-07 at 03:33.
 

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