The emulated machine is an arcade classic called
Phoenix and it uses 8085A processor that is compatible
with the Z80 processor. After a few hours of work the basic emulator (displaying the pseudo graphics) was up and running - thanks to the open source
Z80 emulator. Implementing the rest of the graphics code was an icing on the cake and I really enjoyed it.
The emulator was written purely for educational purposes - basically I just wanted to know how it works. It lacks speed and features (which was not my goal),
but it's playable.
Bellow is the java jar package and the source code. To run the emulator type the following command on the command line:
emu_phoenix_src.zip The source files.
I was going through my old stuff stored on a backup hard-disk and I discovered quite ancient tutorial about how to write an arcade machine emulator.
The text is called "Arcade Emulation How-To" and it was compiled by Michael Adcock in 1997. Reading through it I was quite eager to try to write a simple
emulator according the step-by-step instructions.
java -jar emu_phoenix.jar phoenix.zip
emu_phoenix.jar.zip Executable binary.
Get it if you just want to try it out. Make sure you unzip the archive first.
Emulator source code written in java.