Sharp MZ-80A/MZ-700/MZ-800 emulation for Launchbox integration - MZRaku

[essjaygee]

Hi everyone,

If you are one of the people with fond memories of the Sharp MZ range of computers from the early 1980s, you probably know that there are several very good emulators already available for these machines, You may also understand the difficulties involved in setting these emulators up to work smnoothly via a frontend such as Launchbox. A lot of the difficulties stem from the the fact that BASIC was not in ROM on these machines, needing to be loaded from cassette typically, and that a huge proportion of the available games were written in BASIC. On real hardware, this led to a two stage process of needing to first load BASIC before you could LOAD and RUN your game, and this process is replicated on the established emulators. However, this has meant that it is problematic to open games via a frontend program smoothly. 

MZRaku is designed to solve precisely that problem. It can load games seamlessly from the command line, detecting whether a given cassette image (.mzf/mzt) is a machine code program, or needs BASIC to be present and loading it automatically before the game if required. Games can be set up to run directly from the command line for all three emulated machines. For instance the command below will run MZRaku in MZ-700 mode, extract an MZF file from the specified .zip file, detect that the MZF requires BASIC and load it, before then LOADing and RUNning the game automatically. N.B. you do need to supply the Sharp ROM and BASIC files for each machine yourself - they are not included with the emulator. Details of naming and placement of these file are in the Github repo.

mzraku.exe --mz700 games\mz700\nightmarepark.zip

From an emulation point-of-view, it does not aim to be a completely authentic recreation of the hardware and other, much more mature emulators, are almost certainly superior technically. However, I primarily created MZRaku to meet a personal need and hope it might find a welcome with one or two others who have had the same problem setting up MZ emulators in the past.

The emulator can be downloaded from its Github repo at https://github.com/sgillon/MZRaku. The source is available for you to review and build yourself, and there are two versions of the binary release. If you already have .NET 8 installed, you only need the 'dotnet8' version which is only 600K in size, but there is a larger version which contains all of the runtime files required.

A note about AI - MZRaku was created using AI assistance extensively and you should bear this in mind if you download it. I have reviewed the code and do not believe that there is anything dangerous or unwelcome in there, but I would say that, wouldn't I? The code is fully available in the repo and has no third-party dependencies, needing only the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime (bundled in the standalone download) and standard Windows APIs.

I'd welcome hearing about any issues you might find, or even other general comments, on this thread.

Thanks very much.