So I've been doing more work on the emulator. Fixed a couple of minor bugs (most ridiculously, I'd forgotten to implement RRD and RLD which Astrosmash and Snafu had problems with !).
More work on formats and tapes. The Aquarius has a tape format (CAQ) which is just a binary dump, and a ROM format (BIN) which is an encrypted binary dump.
I've combined these into a single format CQC, which is either a binary ROM or a series of concatenated tape files ; it looks for the standard ROM markers to decide if it is a ROM or not. There is a very low possibility a tape file will have the same markers in the same places. Very low.
Having hacked the ROM a bit , got rid of a few annoyances, fixed the keyboard up, and so on, the cassette system now works like a disk system. You can "CLOAD" a CQC file by name (this limits it to six characters because that's all the Aquarius can have), and then it just works for multi load files. I've removed all the "Press Play and type CR" messages, and the beep (because I don't like it).
You can just CLOAD "ALIENS" from the BASIC command line and it loads the files in automatically. You can also CLOAD ROM cartridges, which is slightly odd, but works well enough. CLOAD "TRON" will load in tron.cqc, it realises it is a ROM cartridge and resets the machine.
All the ROMs seem to mostly work. Not seen any obvious glitches, but you never know.
Sound now works (couldn't find out what the actual calculation was, so worked it out logically ; it's CPU Clock / 64 / SOUND parameter in Hz.
Next up is to check RLD and RRD work properly, to build the various cassette files into CQC files, and then see if I can port it to the ESP32 board.
Plan 9 is to produce a tiny Aquarius hardware copy in the same mode as FabGL's VIC20 an Altair and I've also seen Speccies using it. I reckon, guesstimate, that it could run at 6-7Mhz equivalent on a FabGL.
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