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VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 15-09-2026
Over weeks of rapid, AI-assisted cross-model orchestration, this web-based Microbee emulator has leaped from the PC85 version with BASIC 6.35 using a CP/M shim to Build 6.18. By delegating specific architectural layers to Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude, the development successfully improved on the original BASIC project into an all singing all dancing hybrid.
1. The PC85 Multi-ROM Engine (The original Core Emulation)
This side of the emulator provides a faithful recreation of the original 1985 Microbee PC85 ROM hardware.
2. The Premium CF VibedroneBeeWolf 400
The dedicated fork explicitly built to replicate the physical Premium CompactFlash (CF) modification environment.
Originally just BASIC 6.35 this is now the full CP/M emulation. VibeDroneBeeWolf replicates the physical 8-bit IDE/CF sector layout inside the browser. It maps compact flash drive image files (.hdd-304-4-32) to an 8K CF boot ROM, allowing a seamless virtual cold-boot straight into the CP/M filesystem with 4 5K drives A:thru D: and access to any .dsk file on drive E:
A great shout out to all of yesteryear who developed the hardware / software and later compact flash drive modifications. 1981 to ?2015. Now resurrected as a web browser interface under 300k! Its hard to 'thank' AI but I told them the ROM had to ROM and boot.sys had to sys and they spat out build after build - OVER 600. A complete scaffolded system proved useless 4 days or so ago as to complex to run CP/M so it got torn up and I started again. I am SO sick of testing builds and typing 'no text on screen', 'no drive enumeration', 'only one drive available', 'PCG characters are a mess', 'floppy is totally corrupted', 'BASIC is frozen at start','Real Time Clock still says 1987'. But I got there.
© & ™ Microbee Technology 2026. Built strictly for hobbyist use.
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - fathertedcrilly - 16-09-2026
Great progress
Though perhaps you should just call it BeeWolf
It might be worth getting the agent to run over the code and comment on design decisions
Trying to compile technical notes on system behaviour from multiple sources is painful
The aspect ratio on the last screen shot looks a bit squashed
Is that a pasting artefact ?
Thanks
Tony
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 16-09-2026
Thanks Tony, two issues with the display. ChatGpt decided to create a character set??????. I am still not satisfied I have true 80x25 screen. Pixels are crazy to count. Shell highlight used 16-line PCG glyphs in 10–14-line cells. The renderer showed pad rows 0–3 first, so inverse video became a tall bar and letters sat four scanlines low. Box borders broke when that shift was applied to line tiles too. I'm slowly winning.
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - fathertedcrilly - 16-09-2026
(16-09-2026, 03:28 PM)Graham72 Wrote: Thanks Tony, two issues with the display. ChatGpt decided to create a character set??????. I am still not satisfied I have true 80x25 screen. Pixels are crazy to count. Shell highlight used 16-line PCG glyphs in 10–14-line cells. The renderer showed pad rows 0–3 first, so inverse video became a tall bar and letter sat four scanlines low. Box borders broke when that shift was applied to line tiles too. I'm slowly winning.
It's probably better to consume the real font rom data, program the 6545 for 80x24 ( 8x11 pixels chars ) and let the frame buffer render routine take care of the rest
I use a Metal fragment shader to render the screen at 50hz
(1) draw the screen at native resolution ( 512x256 @ 64x16, 640x264 @ 80x24 )
(2) scale horizontal and vertical resolutions to 512x256
(3) apply the aspect ratio scale ( default to 4/3 ) and general zoom scale ( default 2 )
default Microbee screens look tiny on modern monitors so the general zoom makes it readable
uBee512 uses a 2x aspect ratio scale but I prefer 4/3.
Thanks
Tony
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 16-09-2026
heres how that looks.
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - fathertedcrilly - 16-09-2026
(16-09-2026, 05:38 PM)Graham72 Wrote: heres how that looks.
It's getting there.
Maybe remove the scaling to 512x256 and see whether it looks better
Thanks
Tony
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 18-09-2026
Yes, excellent suggestion. Thank you. I am very very close now. I have tried several games I have never played before and they work.
If the internet is shutdown by AI, i have my Microbee emulation and a lifetimes supply of software
.
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 19-09-2026
Thanks to ChickenMan I asked ChatGpt to fix a colour issue. I then was confused why colours i thought i had in my wolf demo were not displayed. I asked for a deep dive into the emulator and ChatGpt identified over 18 issues.
So far today: CF colour rendering gained bank-aware reads; the run loop and native boot separation were repaired; HALT, interrupts, stack handling and indexed decoding improved; CF reset became model-safe; and 6.97 added CF snapshots, 2MB RAM export, disk-write tracking and safer MBR validation.
I have also got some z80 register issues which confuses me as i thought zexdoc was exhaustive.
I think i need an emulator to emulate my emulator.
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 23-09-2026
HOPEFULLY a proper beta.
RE: VibeDroneBeeWolf400 - Graham72 - 25-09-2026
When you cant see the forest for the trees and BASIC play notes are warbling and EmuJoust keeps freezing for 6 seconds every 15 seconds or so its easy to conflate the issue. Two separate bugs fixed after somelatch key issues as well. Feedback sought- bugs and brickbats welcome. Remember your browser caches the roms/hdd so no need to keep loading them, hit START and experiment.