A bare metal C64 emulator ========================= Well, sunday was somewhat frustrating due to the need to finish some paperwork that should have been done an eternity ago so i needed something to vent this frustration. In an lucky occurence i remembered that i wanted to look into the BMC64 project i had stumbled upon some time ago... and i remembered, that i have a raspberry pi 2 lying around in a drawer... So, what IS the BMC64? Well, its an "bare metal" fork of the VICE C64 emulator running on an raspberry pi. Why is that cool? Because you have nearly no boot time, no need to shut the thing down after usage and on the whole it just feels like an real C64. So, i downloaded the needed zip file, formatted an SD card with a Fat32 file system, unzipped everything onto the card and started to look where i could find the needed ROM files (you need the basic, character set, kernal and the firmware for the floppy) - easiest way is to just download the windows version of vice and extract the files from there - put everything in the right folders and fired the thing up. Man, this was a blast from the past... you plug in the USB cable, the screen flickers and there you are, in C64 BASIC like its the 80s again. The weird thing was, i was immediately able to recall the commands to use the thing, it seems like the endless hours i spend as a child sitting in front of that green phosphorous glowing monitor burned everything into a non erasable part of my brain. Now i HAVE to get the floppy images for the stuff i had back then :-D