Carting your precious RC2014 isn’t always practical.

EtchedPixels has developed a RC2014 emulator that allows you to run a RC2014 ROM in a local linux environment. This is perfect for application development, before or in conjunction with testing on real hardware.

I’m using it to test my assembly builds, in conjunction with the workflow I outlined in the previous post.

It works great under WSL.

To build:

git clone https://github.com/EtchedPixels/RC2014.git
cd RC2014
sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
make

You’ll need to download the appropriate ROM. Details on ROM decoding are available on the RC2014 site, but for a standard Classic II, you want R0000009.BIN, with 32K BASIC and SCM.

To start the emulator in BASIC, start with bank 0:

./rc2014 -a -r R0000009.BIN -e 0

Z80 SBC By Grant Searle

Memory top?
Z80 BASIC Ver 4.7b
Copyright (C) 1978 by Microsoft
32382 Bytes free
Ok

And to start in SCM, start with bank 7:

./rc2014 -a -r R0000009.BIN -e 7


Small Computer Monitor - RC2014
*

I pasted my current WIP intel hex file, ran it and checked the results, and output was exactly what I was expecting (9000 and 9010).



Small Computer Monitor - RC2014
*Ready

*
*g 8000
12345678
1234567*m 9000
9000:  01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08  00 17 DA 1A 22 E5 9E 53  ............"..S
9010:  78 56 34 12 2A AC DD 5B  6F DA 31 A7 3F 43 CB 27  xV4.*..[o.1.?C.'
9020:  BD BF 96 81 E0 A3 78 22  BA 52 3C DC 37 DA 2F 66  ......x".R<.7./f
9030:  40 0C B4 6A B8 92 C5 28  6C F6 CF AB 3A 9A D3 F7  @..j...(l...:...
9040:  5A 69 78 3A 0C F0 5C C6  42 98 A2 79 72 D1 DF B2  Zix:..\.B..yr...
9050:  DE 94 1C 96 26 E2 BE 92  D8 8E 3D 12 28 10 0A 82  ....&.....=.(...
9060:  7A 82 BC 86 73 18 4D B5  B0 EF 2F 22 C1 0E D4 9F  z...s.M.../"....
9070:  A2 F1 35 C8 D3 F4 5A AB  82 98 BE AA A8 C8 2D 22  ..5...Z.......-"

Unfortunately, Windows Terminal can’t generate a SIGTERM from a command stroke (happy to be corrected), so to kill the emulator from a separate tmux pane:

pkill rc2014

I’m now off to code from a coffee shop, with slightly less concern about damaging precious hardware, but with slightly fewer conversation pieces.