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+--- Thread: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC (/thread-999.html)
Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - fathertedcrilly - 05-03-2026
All,
[ you might see the same post across different forums. I'm not sure if everyone has access to Facebook, MSPP or Microbee Technology Forums. Apologies if it seems like spamming ]
My previous attempt at a Microbee emulator (Abeja) turned out to be something of an architectural dead end.
So I decided to let the concept gestate for a while before coming back to try again last last year.
Introducing Novato ( Spanish for beginner, novice or newbie )
Completely rewritten from scratch using modern Swift concurrency, Novato is now at the point where it can boot BASIC 5.22e.
Of course, you won't get any further than that at this stage as I still need to :
- Finish off decoding the z80 instruction set ( mostly flag affecting opcodes )
- Restructure the emulator hot loop to count t-states and update 6545, audio and interrupt routines
- Tie keypresses from SwiftUI into the 6545 class
- Build audio output code
- Build cassette load/save functionality.
You can find Novato at https://github.com/fatherdougalmaguire/Novato
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Tony
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - ChickenMan - 05-03-2026
Well done, a great start, keep it up and I'm sure you will get there.
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - RedskullDC - 06-03-2026
Hi Tony, et al.
Looks really good.
Loaded it up in XCode this evening to take a look.
See there is some support for loading some other bundled ROMs.
Looking forward to seeing your progress with it.
Cheers,
Leslie
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - shane.crozier - 08-03-2026
Hi Tony - looking forward to seeing this evolve
All the best
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - fathertedcrilly - 08-03-2026
(06-03-2026, 11:06 PM)RedskullDC Wrote: Hi Tony, et al.
Looks really good.
Loaded it up in XCode this evening to take a look.
See there is some support for loading some other bundled ROMs.
Looking forward to seeing your progress with it.
Cheers,
Leslie
Hey Leslie
Thanks for the kind words.
I still have a steam powered i5 MacBook Air running Sonoma so that's my base development target.
I haven't tried running any other ROM's just yet ( I was quite surprised BASIC booted to the banner text )
There really isn't a schedule for commits and releases but I'm aiming to drop something once a week
The current commit ( v0.12 build 4 ) now includes a visible scanline shader option.
Thanks
Tony
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - mswidi - 13-03-2026
Nice, will download XCode now and give this a try!
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - fathertedcrilly - 27-03-2026
It seems I have put the cart before the horse here
Novato is not actually booting basic but falling through to the basic demo code due to some serious decoding errors.
These have been fixed but I still appear to be well short of decoding enough instructions for BASIC to actually boot
So it's back to the grindstone and then off to build a test harness to validate everything.
That being said, I've added breakpoint capability to the release in the GitHub repo
Thanks
Tony
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - RedskullDC - 08-04-2026
Hi Tony, et al.
Z80 Test suite may be of use?
https://github.com/raxoft/z80test
Cheers,
Leslie
RE: Novato - a macOS emulator compatible with the Microbee 32IC - fathertedcrilly - 14-04-2026
I'll be using the Jsmoo single step tests ( https://github.com/SingleStepTests/z80 )
Being JSON, they tie nicely into the new Swift testing framework.
And apparently multiple tests can be run in parallel.
Just need to a few helper functions exposed in the Z80 actor to return memory and register snapshots
Once the smoke clears and things are running ok, I'll try the test suite you've mentioned as a secondary test
Thanks
Tony