AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC – Home Computer Emulators – Week 7

Clock Signal

Clock Signal is an emulator of various 8- and 16-bit platforms. Users directly launch classic software with no emulator or per-emulated-machine learning curve. The program supports a wide range of home computers including:

• Acorn Electron;
• Amstrad CPC;
• Apple II/II+ and IIe;
• Atari 2600;
• ColecoVision;
• Commodore Vic-20 (and Commodore 1540/1);
• Macintosh 512ke and Plus;
• MSX 1;
• Oric 1/Atmos;
• Sega Master System; and
• Sinclair ZX80/81.
• Experimental support for Atari ST

This program isn’t in the Manjaro official repositories or the Arch User Repository. This one I had to compile for myself. On my system, I was missing scons, a utility that builds software.

This is installed with the command:

$ sudo pacman -S scons

Next, download the file CLK-2020-07-20.tar.gz from the project’s GitHub Code Repository. Then at a terminal, compile the program with the commands:

$ tar xvf CLK-2020-07-20.tar.gz
$ cd CLK-2020-07-20/OSBindings/SDL
$ scons

Note the final command instructs the compiler (cc1plus) to only use 1 of the 4 cores. To speed up the compilation, use:

$ scons -j4

Copy the binary file to /usr/local/bin with the command:

$ cp clksignal /usr/local/bin/

With 1 core, compiling takes 9 minutes 11 seconds on the AWOW AK41. With the -j4 flag (use all 4 cores), the compilation takes a mere 3 minutes 24 seconds.

This image shows a game of chess in progress with this emulator.

It’s emulating the ZX81, a home computer which has a base configuration of 1 KB of on-board memory that could be officially expanded externally to 16 KB. Yes, that’s not GB, or MB, but really KB!

Unsurprisingly, the AK41 didn’t have any problems emulating a ZX81.

Next page: Page 5 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – FS-UAE
Page 3 – ZEsarUX & Hatari
Page 4 – Clock Signal
Page 5 – Summary

Complete list of articles in this series:

This blog is written on the AWOW AK41 Mini PC.