PERQemu v0.4.6 now available

[Skeezics]

Greetings, legions of die-hard PERQ fanatics! To you hale and hearty few, and to those who are "PERQ adjacent" or "PERQ curious", I'm pleased to announce that a reasonably stable new release is available for messin' with. This is a pre-release from my own experimental branch of what I hope will become v0.5.0 if/when it's merged into the master. The last two years have seen the Great Refactoring, where most of the emulator's guts have been reorganized and rewritten to allow for lots more cool stuff to come. The highlights:

* Real Z80 emulation and peripheral chips emulated at the register level means the PERQ-2 models can be emulated;
* SDL2 for the display means this version will run on 64-bit OSes with no 32-bit WinForms limitations;
* A bunch of additional hard disk images are bundled now so you can mess with 7 different versions of 4 OSes (POS, MPOS, Accent and PNX)!

While only PERQ-1 models are currently implemented, some PERQ-2 features (like landscape display) are available now. Much, much more is in the pipeline.

Source code for the original PERQemu is here:
https://github.com/jdersch/PERQemu

The v0.4.6 release (binary) and source links are here:
https://github.com/skeezicsb/PERQemu/releases

The "experiments" branch where you can catch all the latest insanity:
https://github.com/skeezicsb/PERQemu/tree/experiments

While there are still plenty of rough edges, things have stabilized enough for daily use. You can follow the experiments branch for fixes and new features as they roll out.

Enjoy!

[tpear]

Looking forward to trying this! Have seen the code quietly ticking over on GitHub — a real labour of love; many thanks Skeezics!

Am I right in thinking it was possible to upload new code to the Z80 on the PERQ 2? If so, is it known if anything — eg any of the myriad of OSs - made use of this?

Looking forward to seeing if the switch to sdl makes up the emulator easier to use on my Mac 😊