BlastEm 0.3.1 ------------- Installation ------------ Extract this archive to a directory of your choosing. If you wish to change the configuration settings, copy default.cfg to $HOME/.config/blastem/blastem.cfg and modify the copy. You may also whish to add the blastem directory to your PATH environment variable. Usage ----- BlastEm does not have much of a GUI at the moment and expects a filename to be passed to it at startup. You can do this by either running it from the command line or associating it with a file type. To get a list of supported command line options on Linux or OSX type: ./blastem -h From within your BlastEm directory. On Windows type: blastem.exe -h Configuration ------------- Configuration is read from the file at $HOME/.config/blastem/blastem.cfg if it exists, othwerise it is read from default.cfg from the same directory as the BlastEm executable. Sections are denoted by a section name followed by an open curly bracket, the section's contents and a closing curly bracket. Individual configuration values are set by entering the value's name followed by a space or tab and followed by the desired value. Bindings -------- The keys subsection of bindings maps keyboard keys to gamepad buttons or UI actions. The key name goes on the left and the action is on the right. Most keys are named for the character they produce when pressed. Additionally, the arrow, enter and escape keys have the symbolic names up, down, left, right, enter and esc respectively. Other keys that do not produce characters are not yet supported. The pads subsection is used to map gamepads and joysticks. Analog axes are not currently supported. An example configuration is provided in default.cfg to map SDL joystick 0 to the second controller. Video ----- The video section currently has three settings: "width", "vertex_shader" and "fragment_shader". "width" sets the width of the window in pixels. Height is calculated from this value. Both width and height can be overridden from the command line. "vertex_shader" and "fragment_shader" control which GLSL shader files are used for rendering the display when in Open GL rendering mode. Shaders can be used to implement graphical filters and other effects. Audio ----- The audio section has two config values: rate and buffer. rate selects the sample rate and buffer sets the size of the output buffer in samples. 512 is generally a good value, but if you're experiencing audio dropouts you might want to increase it to 1024. Debugger -------- BlastEm has an integrated command-line debugger loosely based on GDB's interface. The interface is very rough at the moment. Available commands in the 68K debugger are: b ADDRESS - Set a breakpoint at ADDRESS d BREAKPOINT - Delete a 68K breakpoint a ADDRESS - Advance to address n - Advance to next instruction o - Advance to next instruction ignoring branches to lower addresses (good for breaking out of loops) s - Advance to next instruction (follows bsr/jsr) c - Continue bt - Print a backtrace p[/(x|X|d|c)] VALUE - Print a register or memory location vs - Print VDP sprite list vr - Print VDP register info zb ADDRESS - Set a Z80 breakpoint zp[/(x|X|d|c)] VALUE - Display a Z80 value q - Quit BlastEm Available commands in the Z80 debugger are: b ADDRESS - Set a breakpoint at ADDRESS de BREAKPOINT - Delete a Z80 breakpoint a ADDRESS - Advance to address n - Advance to next instruction c - Continue p[/(x|X|d|c)] VALUE - Print a register or memory location di[/(x|X|d|c)] VALUE - Print VALUE before every debugger prompt q - Quit BlastEm The -d flag can be used to cause BlastEm to start in the debugger. Alternatively, you can use the ui.enter_debugger action (mapped to the 'u' key by default) to enter the debugger while a game is running. GDB Remote Debugging -------------------- In addition to the native debugger, BlastEm can also act as a GDB remote debugging stub. To use this, you'll want to configure your Makefile to produce both an ELF executable and a raw binary. Invoke an m68k-elf targeted gdb with the ELF file. Once inside the gdb session, type: target remote | BLASTEM_PATH/blastem ROM_FILE.bin -D where BLASTEM_PATH is the relative or absolute path to your BlastEm installation and ROM_FILE.bin is the name of the raw binary for your program. BlastEm will halt at the beginning of your program's entry point and return control to GDB. This will allow you to set breakpoints before your code runs. On Windows, the procedure is slightly different. First run blastem.exe ROM_FILE.bin -D This will cause BlastEm to wait for a socket connection on port 1234. It will appear to be frozen until gdb connects to it. Now open the ELF file in gdb and type: target remote :1234 Trace points and watch points are not currently supported. Included Tools -------------- BlastEm ships with a few small utilities that leverage portions of the emulator code. dis - 68K disassembler zdis - Z80 disassembler vgmplay - Very basic VGM player stateview - GST save state viewer License ------- BlastEm is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or higher. This gives you the right to redistribute and/or modify the program as long as you follow the terms of the license. See the file COPYING for full license details. Binary releases of BlastEm are packaged with GLEW and SDL2 which have thier own licenses. See GLEW-LICENSE and SDL-LICENSE for details.