Hi,

I know it's been a while, but I have slowly been working on what will eventually
be version
0.7 of ElectrEm. At present the main changes are stuff that isn't necessarily
obvious to do
with emulation accuracy and characteristics of the hardware that were, for me,
non-
obvious and I believe not previously documented. Tests against the few known
non-
working titles suggest that the emulator is now capable of playing 100% of the
games
listed on The Stairway to Hell, so that's pretty good. Version 0.6c still had
issues with a
few esoteric uses of the hardware, such as Evening Star and Southern Belle and
included
some "maybe this is what is going on, I don't really know" stuff for the Players
titles such
as Joe Blade. That's all been swept aside now.

There are two main things to do before a real release — put together a working
Windows
release and implement a new sound filtering system suggested to me by Peter
Hanratty of
Retrospec. The current system essentially does a bandpass on sound that is
explicitly
communicated to the hardware as a certain frequency and point samples everything
else.
So this should be an improvement on that, though it'll probably not be obvious
beyond
Exile.

A year or so of inactivity has led me to accidentally, but hopefully
temporarily, lock myself
out of both of the normal ElectrEm sites so the file can be grabbed at
http://members.allegro.cc/ThomasHarte/temp/ElectrEmTest230608.zip and is about
1.1
megabytes. You'll probably need OS X v10.4 or later.

As I inevitably drop some personal detail or another into these messages, I'm
going to
mention in passing that I now live and work in London, still in publishing.

Feedback on the test release, if anybody else here uses OS X at all, is very
welcome. But
I'm going to make no attempt to conceal the fact that I'm partly releasing this
to pressure
myself into pushing through to a proper release.

Probably the thing that's going to require the most energy is getting the
Windows build
together as my version of the OS and build-chain have fallen sufficiently far
behind the
times that I now can't build against the most-recent version of SDL and have to
either do
something about that or link against an older, unsupported version of that
library.
Obviously I'd rather do the former.