I know there are many out there, but none of them were ticking my fancy, so I decide to write my own. To start with it was "How hard can it be really?" then it snowballed as more and more things were fixed & added. It's been shelved for a while because well, it lacked documentation, headers, licence and stuff, so I spent some time cleaning it up for release.
One primary reason for this project was that linapple (or -pie) codebase is really horrible. It dates back from 2000's or before, with loads of Windows crud leftover, some SDL crud added, the audio just doesn't really work, and overall if you want to hack around the codebase, it's pretty dreadful.
* **Control-F12** is Control-Reset on the IIe. (**Shift-Control-F12** is **Open Apple-Reset**)
* **'Super'** left and **'Super'** right are **Open** and **Close Apple** keys.
These keys are mapped to the left and right 'Windows' keys on a PC keyboard, and they might want to open the start menu (I know it's the case with Cinnamon), so you might want to disable that.
* Well it has it's own command line shell, using my own [libmish](https://github.com/buserror/libmish) so there's loads you can do by... *telnet into* the emulator!
* Yes, you can telnet into the running emulator!
+ The telnet port is displayed in the window title bar.
+ The port is 'semi random' -- it tries to find one that is derivative of the program name, but it will try several until it finds one that is free.
* It has it's own debugger shell. You can:
+ Add break/watch points.
+ Step, Next (jump over JSR's), Continue, Halt
+ Has a 16 instruction trace history when hitting a breakpoint.
+ Dump memory map
+ Trigger soft switches
+ Disassemble
* Also MII comes with it's own mini-assembler, used to compile some driver and the CPU unit tests (inspired by apple2ts, see bellow)
* It embeds all the files it needs, ROMs, fonts etc so you don't need to install it, just run it, it'll work.
* MII "Hard Disk" uses 'overlay' files:
+ This writes blocks on a /separate/ (sparse) file from the main file.
+ This "Overlay" is created automatically and allows you to keep your image files clean, unless you want to 'commit' your overlay back in.
+ This allows you to make sure your disk images aren't corrupted when 'hard rebooting' the emulator, if you are in the process of testing/developing a program for example.
## What it cannot do
* A2Desktop PT3 player doesn't see keypresses.
* Thats' about it really, all the other things I tried work
* Joystick support is a bit limited, no 'mapping' I used a (USB) 8bitdo NES30 Pro, and it works, but it's not perfect. But, I can play choplifter with it, so it's good enough for now... *NOTE* Soon will have it's own config dialog to do mapping.
*Obligatory View of [Total Replay](https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade), from legend [4am](https://github.com/a2-4am)*
## Inspiration, Licence etc
* MIT Licence, I think this is the most permissive, and this work is a derivative and has a lot of inpsiration from too many projects to claim anything more restrictive.
* The CPU Emulation was inspired by a few other implementations:
* [Chips](https://github.com/floooh/chips) -- which I used for a little while, but it was a pain to add the 65c02 instructions, and it had stuff I didn't want/need like 6510 emulation.
* [Apple2ts](https://github.com/ct6502/apple2ts/) -- In fact I converted a few bits from there; and I got the idea for the built-in assember from there, and some of the unit tests, AND the Smartport driver emulation idea!
* Other bits were inspired by:
* [bobbin](https://github.com/micahcowan/bobbin) which is newish as well, and is great for text mode, but I didn't like the fact its' all globals etc. I still borrowed the Floppy emulation from there, until I get around to do one.
* [isapple2](https://github.com/ivanizag/izapple2/) for other bits and pieces.
* And of course, countless books, articles and posts read over the last 40 years!
