XRoar - a Dragon and Tandy 8-bit computer emulator
Copyright 2003-2024 Ciaran Anscomb <xroar@6809.org.uk>


Introduction
============

XRoar emulates the Dragon 32/64; Tandy Colour Computers 1, 2 and 3; the
Tandy MC-10; and some other similar machines or clones.  It runs on a
wide variety of platforms.  Emulated hardware includes:

   * Dragon 32, 64, and 200-E; Tandy CoCo 1, 2, & 3; Tandy MC-10; Matra
     & Hachette Alice 4K.
   * DragonDOS, Delta and RS-DOS disk controller cartridges.
   * Orchestra 90-CC stereo sound cartridge.
   * Games Master Cartridge, including the SN76489 sound chip.
   * Glenside IDE cartridge, with IDE hard disk image support.
   * NX32 and MOOH RAM expansions, with SPI and SD card image support.

   Other features include:

   * Raw and translated keyboard modes.
   * Read and write tape images (compact '.cas' files or audio, e.g.
     '.wav').
   * Read and write VDK, JVC and DMK format floppy disk images.
   * Becker port for communication with remote servers.
   * Save and load machine snapshots.
   * GDB target for remote debugging.

   XRoar is easily built from source under Linux, and binary packages
are provided for Windows and Mac OS X+.

   XRoar can also be compiled to WebAssembly, and redistributing it in
this form may provide a convenient way for users to run your Dragon
software.  See XRoar Online (https://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/online/) for
an example.

   XRoar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.

   XRoar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
more details.

   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

   This README contains extracts from the manual.  Binary packages
contain the full manual as a PDF, which is also available from the XRoar
home page (https://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/).

Recent changes
==============

Version 1.5 allows larger or smaller picture areas to be selected,
showing more or less border.  It also introduces optional 60Hz scaling,
stretching pictures vertically to reproduce the image shape more
familiar to users in 60Hz regions (where fewer vertical lines span the
same vertical space).  Both of these can be adjusted in the TV Controls
dialog (or through menu options in the case of Mac OS X+).  MPI slot
configuration is now per-cart rather than global, and you can save
screenshots in PNG format if built against libpng.  In addition, a few
CoCo 3 cartridge games that did not work before now do.

   Version 1.4 replaces the '-ccr simulated' cross-colour renderer with
more CPU-intensive code that also handles PAL. The old NTSC-only
renderer is still available using '-ccr partial'.  Some video options
can be changed on the fly in a new TV Controls dialog.

   Version 1.3 changes the default floppy disk write-back behaviour.
The old behaviour erred on the side of protecting image files from
accidental modification.  Enough people have complained about this--or
at least, the small number that have complained have done so
loudly--that XRoar will now rewrite changes to the backing file by
default.  Run with the '-no-disk-write-back' option to revert to the old
behaviour.  XRoar will still rename the old version of a file to have a
'.bak' extension if possible, and also tries harder not to rewrite the
file if no writes have occurred.

   Version 1.0 introduced support for the Tandy Colour Computer 3 and
the Tandy MC-10.  Version 1.1 adds proper support for the MC-10's French
cousin, the Matra & Hachette Alice (4K).

   Snapshots now store much more state, and of course support the new
emulated machines, but this means the format had to change.  Snapshots
from the last 0.x release are still recognised, and can be loaded, but
this support is likely to be removed in time.

   Tape emulation now supports manual pause control.  On the MC-10, this
defaults to paused, as it has no ability to remotely control the tape
motor.  You will need to un-pause after typing 'CLOAD' or 'CLOADM' on
the MC-10 (File -> Cassette -> Play, or from the tape control tool;
autorunning will do this automatically).

   Previously, the Glenside IDE controller would use a fixed HD image
file in the current working directory.  You must now specify an image
with the '-load-hd0' option.  You can also now attach a second hard disk
image with '-load-hd1', if you have software that can access it.

   Similarly, the NX32 and MOOH cartridges would use a fixed SD image
file, and you must now specify it with the '-load-hd0' option.

   Old IDE images, including those created by XRoar, will have a '.img'
file extension.  In order to distinguish these files from similar images
with no header information, you should now rename these to have a '.ide'
extension.


Installation
************

Binary packages
===============

Pre-built binary packages are available from the XRoar home page
(https://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/).  If one is not available for your
architecture, you will need to build from source.  XRoar should build
and run on any POSIX-like system for which SDL version 2 is available.

   You will also need BASIC ROM images--binary dumps of the firmware
from an original machine.  The originals were part-written by Microsoft,
so they are not distributed in the XRoar packages.

Mac OS X+ binary package
------------------------

Download and unzip the appropriate '.zip' distribution for your system.
Drag the application icon to '/Applications/'.

   For troubleshooting or testing options, it's often a good idea to run
from the command line, but application packages don't make that trivial.
A symbolic link to somewhere in your 'PATH' is all that's required.
e.g.:

     $ sudo ln -s /Applications/XRoar.app/Contents/MacOS/xroar \
             /usr/local/bin/xroar

   After this, you can start the emulator by simply typing 'xroar'
followed by any command line options.

   ROM images should be placed in a directory you create under your
'HOME' named '~/Library/XRoar/roms/' (not the system directory,
'/Library/').  Name any configuration file you create
'~/Library/XRoar/xroar.conf'.

   The Mac OS X+ build provides a menu for access to certain features,
and often accepts the more familiar '<Command>+KEY' in place of the
'<CTRL>+KEY' shortcuts listed in this manual.  It does not provide
control dialog boxes.

Windows binary package
----------------------

Download and unzip the appropriate '.zip' distribution for your system.

   The easiest way forward is to simply put ROM images into the
directory created when you unzip the distribution, and then run the
'.exe' straight from there, or see *note Prerequisites:: for information
on keeping them in a location that should work after installing new
versions.

   You can also put any configuration file ('xroar.conf') in the same
directory.  Again, this can also be placed in a common location.  *Note
The configuration file::.

   Note when troubleshooting that the logging from the Windows binary is
probably only going to be visible if you run it with the '-C' option
(must be the first option) to allocate a console.

   The Windows build provides a reasonably full user-interface,
including menus and control dialogs.

Building from source
====================

Dependencies
------------

If there is no binary package for your system, you will have to build
from source.  XRoar can use various backend toolkits, and you will need
to ensure you have their development files installed.  If you're using
Debian, this can (at the time of writing) be achieved with the following
simple command:

     $ sudo apt install build-essential libsndfile1-dev libgtk2.0-dev \
             libgtkglext1-dev libasound2-dev libpng-dev

   Under Mac OS X+, first be sure to install Apple's Xcode
(https://developer.apple.com/xcode/) package.  The easiest way to then
ensure you have XRoar's dependencies available is to use a system like
Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) or MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/).  For
Homebrew, the following command will install the required dependencies:

     $ brew install libsndfile sdl2

   Otherwise, you'll have to do a bit of platform-specific research to
ensure you have all the dependencies for a full build:

   GTK+ (http://www.gtk.org/), the GIMP toolkit, provides the most
full-featured user interface.  It is only usable as such if you also
have GtkGlExt (http://projects.gnome.org/gtkglext/), an OpenGL extension
used to provide video output.  Otherwise, it can provide a file
requester for use by other user interfaces.  Version 2 only.

   SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/), Simple Directmedia Layer, provides a
slightly more basic user experience.  Menus are added using native code
under Windows and Mac OS X+; any other target using SDL will support
only keyboard shortcuts.  Unless you are building for Linux, SDL is
required to use joysticks.  Version 2 required.

   If libpng (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html) is available,
screenshots can be saved in PNG format.

   POSIX Regular Expressions are used in option parsing, so TRE
(https://laurikari.net/tre/about/) is required on non-POSIX platforms
(e.g.  Windows).

   Other supported audio APIs: OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, CoreAudio.  Some
other options are still in the code base, but have not been tested in a
while.

   libsndfile (http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/) is recommended to
enable support for using audio files as cassette images.

Compilation
-----------

Once you have the dependencies, building XRoar follows a familiar
procedure:(1)

     $ gzip -dc xroar-1.5.5.tar.gz | tar xvf -
     $ cd xroar-1.5.5
     $ ./configure
     $ make
     $ sudo make install

   The 'configure' script has a lot of options guiding what it tests
for, specifying cross-compilation, changing the install path, etc.  List
them all with the '--help' option.

   By default, 'configure' will set up an install _prefix_ of
'/usr/local', but this can be changed by using the '--prefix=PATH'
option.

   Once built, run 'make install' as root (or use 'sudo', as in the
example above) to install the binary and info documentation on your
system.  The executable is called 'xroar'.  ROM images should be placed
either in your home directory as '~/.xroar/roms/', or under the
installation _prefix_ as '_prefix_/share/xroar/roms/'.  Any
configuration file should be created as '~/.xroar/xroar.conf'.

   XRoar can be built on one platform to run on another.  The Windows
binary package is built like this.  To specify a cross-compile, use the
'--host=HOST' argument to 'configure'.  For example, to build for
Windows, you might use './configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32'.  Getting
everything _just so_ for a cross-build can be a tricky procedure, and
the details are beyond the scope of this manual.

   XRoar can be built to a WebAssembly target using Emscripten
(https://emscripten.org/).  With the SDK installed, run 'emconfigure
./configure --enable-wasm' to set up the build environment.  Build with
'emmake make'.  HTML/JavaScript and CSS examples for interfacing to the
output are included in the 'wasm/' subdirectory.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) If you have cloned the git repository, you will need GNU Build
System packages installed: 'autoconf', etc.  Running './autogen.sh'
should then generate the configure script, which you can run as normal.
