AmélieEm (or AmEm under MS-DOS) is a complete software implementation of the Amélie system. It has been designed to allow the firmware to be designed and tested without the need to program a new EPROM for each little modification.

AmélieEm features a powerful tracing mode (called "Tracey"!) which allows single-stepping, modification of registers and/or memory, disassembly, etc etc...

You can read some in-depth information, and also some details about how this software was ported to RISC OS!

• AmélieEm pre-release  (v0.01ah 2007/09/06, 200Kb .EXE installer)
  This is a pre-release version of AmélieEm that you may try out to see how the system works.
  Note: you may not (re)distribute this software by any media or any method.
   
  
• AmélieEm for RISC OS pre-release  (v0.01ah 2007/09/06, 54Kb Zip archive)
  By a stroke of genius, or insanity, I cobbled together an emulation of conio along with the required DOS calls. It is far from perfect, but it works!
  I've wrapped this up as an executable application, complete with light/dark DOSish colours and the obligatory PC-ANSI display font. Click here for more info on how this very-DOS software was ported to RISC OS!
  Note: you may not (re)distribute this software by any media or any method.
  
  The licence file and guide is not supplied with the RISC OS version. The licence is very simple - it is for your personal enjoyment (!) only, it is NOT to be distributed, and it is supplied strictly as-is.
  As for the instruction guide... Click here to read it.
  

The emulation within AmélieEm is missing the following:

• Very very loose support for NMIs. Amélie doesn't use them.
• No support (whatsoever) for the BCD maths features of the 6502. This shouldn't be hard to add though...
• No support for the advanced features of the 6522 VIA (serial shifting, handshaking, Timer2, IRQs on non-CA/CB interrupts).
• Other stuff (just to cover the hiccups of my troubled mind... :-) ).
  
  
• Currently - the ACIA and VIA emulation is fairly basic.
  AmélieEm may be fun to play with in Tracey, but not a lot else can be seen to happen at this time, unless you plan to write yourself a BIOS...
  ...yup, hopefully AmélieEm works enough to start, and run, a BIOS. Though the appsys code doesn't do much; but it will "fake" bump sensing and send/receive via the serial port.
   
• Here's what is new in this release:
  • Support for 8Kb EPROMs (with support for 4Kb EPROMs too).
     
  • Quick Save updated, larger EPROM image size and ACIA details.
     
  • Various ACIA bug-fixes.
     
  • [V] keypress swaps between trace mode and application code screens.
     
  • RISC OS DOS/CONIO bugfixes.
     
• Here's what is new in the previous release(s):
  • You can programmatically byte read/write to the final byte in every 1024 byte block within the designated RAM allocation (16K). Normally accesses beyond the official 2K memory area are faulted; however this specific method will be permitted to allow you to implement probing for available memory.
    Note: This means there is wraparound - writes to &1FFF will be reflected in &07FF (etc).
     
  • Pressing functions keys F1 to F6 will trigger the appropriate "bump" behaviour, refer to the RickBot information for specifics.
    Note: This is not (yet) reflected within appsys, but your firmware code will be able to pick up on it.
     
  • Bug fixes - such as the screen now redraws correctly after forcing a processor/emulator reset.
    Note: Reset does not clear memory, nor does it force the EPROM code to be reloaded. You can do this by: 1, clear memory by setting all bytes to zero (&0000 to &FFFF); 2, reload EPROM image; 3, call reset.
     
  • More complete ACIA implementation, plus status visible within Tracey.
    Note: You cannot Poke the ACIA registers, this will instead permit you to tell the emulator whether or not a serial lead in "connected" (state of !DSR and !DCD).
     
  • The Breakpoint List now also lists break-on-event(s) defined.
     
  • Supplied BIOS image now whizzes through the LEDs in sequence, and outputs '.' characters to serial, so something can be seen to be happening when outside of Tracey.
    Yes - appsys now does something!
     
  • Major revisions to the RISC OS version of conio so works almost as good as the DOS version. :-)
     
• New in both the RISC OS and DOS versions is the LED status and clock is written to the display upon a refresh. There is little else changed in the DOS version; quite a lot changed in the RISC OS version.

VeroDes

Here are a few whitepapers that have been written to explain several facets of Amélie's operation.
These documents were written on an Acorn PocketBook II (rebadged Psion 3A organiser), and printed via a Hewlett Packard PCL to PDF convertor. Thus they are pleasingly small, rather than the 100s-of-kilobytes PDFs that are generated under Windows...