MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: MAME 0.168

I know this is kinda self-promotion, but this release is a big update for the Osborne 1 computer. Although it wasn't much of a home computer with its tiny text-only display and beep-only sound, it was significant as the one of the first successful portable business computers. As such, it has a decent library of CP/M business applications. There are also a number of text-based games for it, including some popular Infocom adventures.

MAME now correctly emulates the quirky memory banking used in the Osborne 1, so memory test programs now pass, and writes to memory-mapped I/O devices no longer clobber system memory. Undocumented ROM and I/O mirroring is now emulated on the off chance that some software may use it. This improvement was made possible in part thanks to O. Galibert’s improvements to the Z80 core for the Sinclair home computers.

MAME now supports the features of the SCREEN-PAC™ 104-column video add-on board. It can be enabled or disabled through the system configuration menu. Scrolling behaviour has been corrected in standard- and high-resolution modes. The beeper sound generation is now accurate to the schematics, too.

Serial port emulation has been added, so you can try out CP/M dial-up terminal software like AMCALL, or copy files in and out of the emulated Osborne 1 using the PIP command. Serial speed jumpering configuration is available via the system configuration menu.

In other user-facing changes, the soft reset key is now available (it actually generates a non-maskable interrupt rather than actually resetting the machine), and you can view the contents of video memory in MAME’s tilemap viewer (the characters are displayed in memory order – underline, intensity and scrolling are not considered).

So if you want to know what a journalist or travelling salesman might have had to play with in the early ’80s, give the osborne1 a spin.

Robbbert has also made the (less commercially successful) Osborne Vixen usable. I see you thanked OG in your commit message Robbbert, but there’s nothing there that wasn’t possible before his latest Z80 changes. It’s supported having different program read handlers for ages to support the Capcom Kabuki encrypted Z80 :P