February 14, 2013

B–em

Follow-up to BBC Computer 32K, Acorn DFS, BASIC from Mike's blag

So I found a better BBC Emulator than BeebEm. It's called B-em. Why is it better?

  • It was last updated about a year ago rather than about 5 years ago. Newer is better, right? Sure it is.
  • It allows easy modification of the keyboard layout, including a menu option to remap A/S to Caps Lock/Ctrl which makes playing Arcadians practical. This is nicer than mucking around with setting an environment variable for SDL to make Caps Lock work like a regular key and using xmodmap to remap keys, which is how I made Arcadians playable with BeebEM.
  • It makes disk-drive like noises when you run disks.
  • Probably other... things... maybe...

I run it on SLED 11 SP2. If you want to do likewise, here's how.

If you don't already have it, get the SLE-SDK from http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=NgW3ToaagDQ~ and use YaST to add it as an Add on Product.

Install the following packages: cmake zlib-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel xorg-x11-libX11-devel libogg-devel freetype2-devel libpulse-devel alsa-devel flac-devel libvorbis-devel alsa-oss automake gcc make gcc-c++

Then, as a regular user, run these commands:

$ cd
$ mkdir b-em
$ cd b-em
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${PWD}/lib/pkgconfig/
$ export PATH=$PATH:${PWD}/bin
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${PWD}/lib
$ export LIBS="-L${PWD}/lib"
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I${PWD}/include"
$ curl -L http://sourceforge.net/projects/alleg/files/allegro/4.4.2/allegro-4.4.2.tar.gz/download | tar zxvf -
$ cd allegro-4.4.2/
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DWANT_LINUX_CONSOLE=on -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$(dirname $(dirname $PWD)) ..
$ make install
$ cd ../..
$ curl http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal-releases/openal-soft-1.15.1.tar.bz2 | tar jxvf -
$ cd openal-soft-1.15.1/build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$(dirname $(dirname $PWD)) ..
$ make install
$ cd ../..
$ curl http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/ALUT/freealut-1.1.0.tar.gz | tar xzvf -
$ cd freealut-1.1.0/
$ ./configure --prefix=$(dirname "${PWD}") && make && make install
$ cd ..
$ curl -L http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/B-emv2.2Linux.tar.gz | tar xvfz -
$ for i in INSTALL depcomp COPYING compile;do unlink $i; ln -s /usr/share/automake-1.10/$i;done
$ ./configure --prefix=${PWD} && make
$ mv b-em b-em.real
$ cat > b-em << EOF
#!/bin/bash
dir="$( cd "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )";
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${dir}/lib";
cd "${dir}"
./b-em.real
EOF
$ chmod u+x b-em


Grab the images for your favourite games from somewhere such as Stairway to Hell and run the b-em executable

$ ~/b-em/b-em

F11 shows/hides the menu. Once you've loaded a disk you need to hide the menu again and press Shift-F12 to run it.

Obligatory screenshot:

Arcadians running on B-em

The trick to maximum points in Arcadians is to only shoot the aliens whilst they're swooping down. You get double the points for picking them off whilst they're in motion.


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