Ample 0.274 – ACORN BBC and C64 Support Added

Ample 0.274 – ACORN BBC and C64 Support Added

The MAC OS X based Ample MAME interface has been updated. Kelvin Sherlock, the curator of the Ample Interface introduced additional support for the retro Macintosh Portables as well as support for the ACORN BBC Micro series of computers and the Commodore 64.

This release of the Ample interface marks the 66th release of the emulator and brings the Ample package up to MAME 0.274 and includes a modified MAME package which allows emulation of those machines included in the interface.

Some of the features of the Ample interface include the ability to control almost every aspect of the emulated platform through the interface. New items included in Ample 0.274 include the following:

  • Include MAME 0.274
  • Added various Acorn BBC support
  • Added c64 support
  • There’s a new keyboard option for Natural Keyboard (Option-Command-K, which was previously used for the UI Keyboard toggle)

BBC and C64 have a couple things in common. One thing is that they both start up in a BASIC REPL. And when you try to enter PRINT “HELLO”, you’ll notice the second thing they have in common – the keyboards are a mess, by modern standards. So for BBC and C64, Ample will start MAME with a natural keyboard. This makes normal keys do what you expect BUT modifiers (control, shift, etc) don’t work at all. You can enable/disable via the Special menu or Option-Command-K. (BBC has option mapped to shift lock so you should probably use the menu to void triggering that).

While we’re at it, BBC doesn’t quite work with square pixels (BBC starts in mode 7 and mode 7 is a different resolution. Don’t ask).

Ample includes all of the retro Apple computing platforms including the Apple-1, Apple II, Apple III, Apple IIGS (various ROMs) as well as the Apple II Clones and a variety of Retro Macintosh platforms. Also included is support for the Oric, Atari ST and Tandy TRS-80 platforms.

While Ample started off as a clean interface for just the retro Apple II/III series computers, it has become one of the best emulation packages for a nice variety of computing platforms.

A.P.P.L.E. is now supporting the ROM interface as a means to provide a single place for the necessary external ROM components of the emulator. These ROMs are only for the purpose of the Ample package and should not be hot-linked to within your websites.

You can download the Source Code and the binaries for the Ample interface from the Ample GitHub page at: https://github.com/ksherlock/ample

IMPORTANT: You will need to download the additional ROMs that support the new machines. This can be done through the ROM manager in the Ample interface.

Author: vadmin