https://blog.jgc.org/2022/04/setting-up-and-running-mame-emulation.html

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Saturday, April 02, 2022

Setting up and running the MAME emulation of the Minitel 2

In a previous post I showed how I modified a Minitel 2 to run
arbitrary firmware. The firmware I used came from a chap who has
played around with Minitel 2s quite a bit. And, as I said in that
previous post, I want to write my own firmware. 

My original plan was to write the firmware and use the Dataman S4's
emulation capability to avoid having to burn EPROMs for each build.
But the aforementioned chap has made things even easier by creating a
Minitel 2 emulation in MAME.

If you download MAME you'll find the Minitel 2 included as a standard
machine:

[Screen]

Naturally, you'll need some ROMs. The Minitel 2 emulator in MAME
knows about three ROMs: minitel2_bv4.bin (which is the BV4 version of
the original firmware), bv9.1402 (the BV9 original firmware; that's
the one my actual Minitel 2 had burnt into the CPU)
and demo_minitel.bin (which is the demo ROM I used in the previous
post). You also need charset.rom which contains the character set for
the Minitel.

You need to find these. I got them by searching for "bv9.1402
minitel" and found them here. 

Here are the steps I took to get MAME + Minitel2 running on my Mac.
Initially, I figured I'd use brew but ran into some random errors and
I'm too old to fight package managers. So, I switched to using the
instructions on the main MAME website.

For the Mac, MAME runs using a thing called SDL and details are here.
You first need to install SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) from here.

[Screen]

The .dmg doesn't open with an installer, but the ReadMe.txt has the
instructions:

    To Install:
    Copy the SDL2.framework to /Library/Frameworks

which I did. After that you can download MAME itself. It's a simple
ZIP file that expands into a directory:

$ pwd
/code/mame0241-x86
$ ls
COPYING ctrlr imgtool ldverify romcmp
artwork docs ini mame roms
bgfx floptool jedutil nltool samples
castool hash keymaps nlwav uismall.bdf
cfg history language nvram unidasm
chdman hlsl ldresample plugins whatsnew.txt

I mentioned above the need to install the Minitel 2 ROMs. They go
into the roms directory (highlighted above) in a subdirectory called 
minitel2.

$ ls -R roms
dir.txt minitel2

roms/minitel2:
bv9.1402 demo_minitel.bin
charset.rom minitel2_bv4.bin

At which point you can simply start MAME. If you start it with just .
/mame it seems to take over the entire screen on the Mac and is very
hard to exit. Better to start with the -window option which will open
it in a desktop window (see the screenshot above).

./mame -window

Then scroll down to Minitel 2 and double click on it. This will pop
up a menu of available ROMs:

[Screen]

The Bv9 and BV4 ROMs are the standard Minitel 2 firmware and Minitel
2 Demo is Del Nero's demo firmware that I used in a previous post.
Here's what it looks like running in MAME:

[Screen]

If you run the standard Minitel 2 firmware ROMs they start with the
machine powered off (the real Minitel would need its power button
pressing to start). The MAME implementation maps the following
function keys on the Mac to special keys on the Minitel 2 keyboard.

    F1         ->     Suite
    F2         ->     Retour
    F3         ->     Envoi
    F4         ->     Repetition
    F5         ->     TEL
    F6         ->     Guide
    F7         ->     Sommaire
    F8         ->     Connexion/Fin
    F9         ->     Fonction
    F10        ->     On/Off

So, pressing Command-Fn-F10 on the Mac will start the standard
firmware:

[Screen]

Finally, if you are interested in writing your own Minitel 2 firmware
MAME's debugger is very useful and can disassemble the running ROMs
and allows single stepping etc. Start it with ./mame -window -debug
minitel2.

This will bring up the main MAME window and a debug window like this:

[Screen]







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Setting up and running the MAME emulation of the Minitel 2

In a previous post I showed how I modified a Minitel 2 to run
arbitrary firmware . The firmware I used came from a chap who has
played aroun...

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