Introduction

The Colour Genie was the heavily modified offspring of the EACA Video Genie.

It had 16 colours and was mounted with a CRTC display IC as well as a General Instruments AY-3-8910 PSG. Later revisions had modified colours, screen size as well as various expansions and an updated BASIC ROM.

The Colour Genie was marketed in Europe (UK/Germany) and also in New Zealand and Australia.

The current version of Genieous supports the unexpanded Colour Genie.

What Is Genieous?

Genieous is an emulator. It imitates the behaviour of a Colour Genie on the 32-bit Windows platform (natively).

Although two very good Colour Genie emulators exist, they are made to run under MS-DOS, are outdated and no longer maintained.

Genieous is freeware, and may be distributed freely if unaltered, and the copyright notice is retained. As a consequence, the author takes no responsibilities whatsoever for any damage caused by this emulator. In short: Use it at your own risk!

Genieous aims to exploit the benefits of a graphical user interface with features such as drag'n'drop, intuitive menus etc.

New releases of the emulator will be published on the following page:
http://gaia.atilia.eu

Genieous Features

• Full and cycle exact Z80 CPU core with NMI interrupt (RESET)
• Partial CRTC 6545 emulation
• Support for 16 and 32 kb memory setups
• 3 channel AY-3-8910 PSG emulation along with the noise and envelope generators
• Full keyboard emulation, with optional symbolic mapping
• Read/write support for the CAS tape format
• Read/write support for tape WAV format
• Tape sound

Genieous Missing Features

• I/O port on the YM2149/AY-3-8190 sound board is not emulated (printer & joystick)
• The CRTC emulation is incomplete
• Disk emulation is broken

Running

To run this program, you require, at a minimum, Windows 95.

No installation is necessary, just copy the contents of the ZIP package to a new folder and click on the executable called "Geneious.exe".

The simplest way to get programs started is with drag 'n drop or via the File->Autostart menu option. When drag 'n dropping a disk image file, keeping the Ctrl key down will reboot the emulated machine.

Command Line Options

General format:

Genieous.exe [/a] [/d] [/h] [/i filename] [/m] [/w] [filename]

For now, only a few command line switches are supported:

Monitor

The program has a simple built-in monitor/disassembler. By pressing ESC[-APE] can this be entered. On pressing this button again, one can return to the emulated machine. Further keyboard shortcuts:

Drive

Although the WD1771 disk controller emulation is available, the images do not appear to work. Only a couple of CGD images show a directory with the CMD"I" command.

Tape

This was the most widespread and thus most important peripheral of the Colour Genie.

Two major formats exist for tape emulation: CAS and WAV. Both are read-/writeable.

WAV

This format can be used if one would like to transfer a program to the real machine. The result can be then played back via the sound output of the PC to a tape and reloaded on the real machine.

For creating such WAV, one has to first choose 'Create WAV' from the Tape menu, press PLAY/RECORD by selecting the appropriate menu point from the Tape menu and issuing the necessary commands in the emulated machine (for example: CSAVE"NAME"). The saving process is done realtime (=slow) but the process can be accelerated by pressing ALT+F3 that gives full CPU power to the emulator on your machine. It is important that once the save command has finished the tape must be stopped (via the Tape menu, by ticking PLAY/RECORD off) and the WAV should be closed (very important!).

The Colour Genie used a 1200 baud tape recording frequency.

CAS/CGD

A quicker and more efficient format, widespread in the TRS-80 world as well. It is a literal byte-exact representation of what is written to a real tape on a real Colour Genie. It is only slightly different from the TRS-80/VideGenie-I format.

Saving/loading of CAS files is done via ROM traps and hence it is not supporting custom loaders, but in return it is much quicker. Most load and save operations finish in a snap. BASIC programs can be saved with the CSAVE"NAME" command, in this case a pop-up window will appear where you must fill in the name and location of the desired CAS image.

Saving a given memory location in CAS format is also possible via the file menu. Here you must fill in the begin and the end of the memory area that is about to be saved along with the start address which defaults to 0066h which is the NMI entry point (soft RESET).

Converting Colour Genie Cassettes To CAS Files

A number of tools exist which will allow emulator files to be created from original Colour Genie cassettes. The most important of these is CASSLOAD.EXE which is listed under "Colour Genie Conversion Tools" on www.everygamegoing.com.

DOS Extension

The emulator comes with support for the disk expanstion ROM. You can enable it via the machine setup dialog window by selecting 'custom machine configuration'.

Thanks

I'd like to thank these people their help: info, testing, being nice, etc. :-)

• Terry Stewart,
• Reinhard Gansweith,
• people on the EACA mailing list

Links

Wikipedia page on the Colour Genie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_Genie

Terry Stewart's System-80 and EACA resource site:
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/system-80/

Reinhard Gansweith's webpage on the Colour Genie (in German):
http://gansweith.freehostia.com/colourgenie/

Changelog

v1.0.3

Better CRTC vblank
Realtime saturation setting
Minor improvements

v1.0.2

PC-joystick and gamepad support
Centronics printer support (output sent to printer.txt)
Adjustable colour display saturation
Re-enabled basic breakpoint support in the external monitor
Compiled statically against the Visual C++ runtime

v1.0.1

Custom Z80 CPU frequencies (between 500000 and 10 mln Hz)
Added original German character set
Improved and optimized display emulation

v1.0

First public release
Ability to use custom ROMs
CRTC
AY-3-8190 (YM2149) sound emulation
CAS tape format support (R/W)
WAV tape format support (R/W)
Save screenshot in GIF format (when non 1-bit display)
PAL blur
TV interlace/double scan
Save emulator output to AVI video
Large window mode
Full screen mode
Paste text from the clipboard
Copy screen buffer to the clipboard
Settings saved in the registry
Drag'n drop support
Support for command line options
Autostart emulator images (great for novice users)
Simulated keyboard input from external text files (BAS/TXT)
Selectable RAM size
Support for Northern and Southern versions of the machine

Game Credits

© 2009-2015 Attila Grósz
http://gaia.atilia.eu