1. INTRODUCTION ------------ Caprice32 is one of the best emulator of the Amstrad CPC home computer series running on Windows and Unix. The emulator faithfully imitates the CPC464, CPC664, and CPC6128 models. It has been written by Ulrich Doewich. PSPCap32 is a port on PSP of the version 4.2.0, done by myself in April 2006. 2. CONTROL ------------ 2.1 - Virtual keyboard In the CPC emulator window, there are three differents mappings (standard, left trigger, and right Trigger mappings). You can toggle between while playing inside the emulator using the two PSP trigger keys. ------------------------------------- PSP CPC (standard) Square Backspace Triangle ENTER Circle Joystick Fire 1 Cross Joystick Fire 2 Up Up Down Down Left Left Right Right Analog Joystick ------------------------------------- PSP CPC (left trigger) Square FPS Triangle Load state Cross Save state Circle Analog Joystick Up Inc Delta Y Down Dec Delta Y Left Render mode Right Render mode Analog Joystick ------------------------------------- PSP CPC (right trigger) Square Backspace Triangle ENTER Circle Escape Cross Auto-fire mode (on/off) Up Up Down Down Left Dec auto-fire frequency Right Inc auto-fire frequency Analog Joystick Press Start + L + R to exit and return to eloader. Press Select to enter in emulator main menu. Press Start open/close the virtual keyboard In the main menu RTrigger Reset the emulator Triangle Go Up directory Cross Valid Circle Valid Square Go Back to the emulator window The virtual Keyboard of "Danzel" and "Jeff Chen" Use Analog stick to choose one of the 9 squares, and use Triangle, Square, Cross and Circle to choose one of the 4 letters of the highlighted square. Use LTrigger and RTrigger to see other 9 squares figures. 2.2 - IR keyboard You can also use IR keyboard. Edit the pspirkeyb.ini file to specify your IR keyboard model, and modify eventually layout keyboard files in the keymap directory. The following mapping is done : IR-keyboard PSP Cursor Digital Pad Tab Start Ctrl-W Start Escape Select Ctrl-Q Select Ctrl-E Triangle Ctrl-X Cross Ctrl-S Square Ctrl-F Circle Ctrl-Z L-trigger Ctrl-C R-trigger In the emulator window you can use the IR keyboard to enter letters, special characters and digits. 3. LOADING CPC SNAPSHOT FILES ------------ Using the Linux or Windows version of Caprice32 on your PC, you can save any snapshot files of your CPC games or applications. You can then save those snapshot files (with .zip or .sna file extension) on your PSP memory stick in the 'snap' directory. Then, while inside CPC emulator, just press SELECT to enter in the emulator main menu, and then using the file selector choose one snapshot file to load in the RAM of your emulator. Save state files are now saved using gzip compression, with SNZ as file extention). It's much faster to save or load states. You can use gzip or 7-zip to convert old SNA to SNZ. SNA file format is still supported for loading, so you convert your previous saved files (or original Caprice32 files), directly inside the emulator. 4. LOADING CPC DISK FILES ------------ If you want to load disk image in the virtual drive A of your emulator, you have to put your disk file (with .zip or .dsk file extension or gzipped disk file with .dsz file extension) on your PSP memory stick in the 'disk' directory. You proceed as previously described for snapshot files, and your disk is then inserted in the drive 'A' of your emulator. Gzipped disk files are not writable, but they are much faster to load (mainly on fw >= 3.80 because memory stick access has become very very slow : ( ... As for SNZ file, you might use 7-zip to convert .dsk files to .dsz. The first method to launch a game after loading a disk file, is to set the "Disk startup" option to "full" and to set the "Reset on startup" option to true. When you insert a disk using the "Load disk" menu then game will start automatically. If you want to can set the "Disk startup" option to "manual", and browser yourself the content of the disk using the "Explore disk" menu. If you want to do all this manually, set the "Disk startup" option to "manual" and proceed as explained in the following paragraphs. To display the content of your drive, you have to use the virtual keyboard (press START key) and type the CPC command 'CAT' followed by ENTER (Triangle). For example if you have loaded the disk file of the game "Green Beret" : CAT You should see something like this : Drive A: user 0 GBERET . * 15K 140K free You can also use directly the shortcut in the emulator menu (Command CAT option) Then if you want to run a program GBERET that is on your drive 'A', you have to use the CPC command 'RUN' as follow : RUN"GBERET If the filename of the .dsk (here gberet.dsk) is also the name of the program you want to run (here gberet) then you can use directly the Command RUN" in the emulator menu. If the command to run is different from the filename then you can specify the proper command to RUN in the file run.txt, for example : mygame=DISC Then, while using the Command RUM/CPM menu, the emulator will type RUN"DISC instead of RUN"mygame. Have a look the file run.txt for details about the syntax. You can specify CPM games in the run.txt file using the following syntax: mygame=|CPM Then, when using the Command RUM/CPM menu, the emulator will use the |CPM command (instead of RUN"mygame). If you have saved the state of a game, then a thumbnail image will be displayed in the file requester while selecting any file (snapshot, disk, keyboard, settings) with game name, to help you to recognize that game later. You can use the virtual keyboard in the file requester menu to choose the first letter of the game you search (it might be useful when you have tons of games in the same folder). Entering several time the same letter let you choose sequentially files beginning with the given letter. You can use the Run key of the virtual keyboard to launch the game. 6. CHEAT CODE (.CHT) ---------- You can use cheat codes with PSP-CAP32 emulator. You can add your own cheat codes in the cheat.txt file and then import them in the cheat menu. All cheat codes you have specified for a game can be save in a CHT file in 'cht' folder. Those cheat codes would then be automatically loaded when you start the game. The CHT file format is the following : # # Enable, Address, Value, Comment # 1,36f,3,Cheat comment Using the Cheat menu you can search for modified bytes in RAM between current time and the last time you saved the RAM. It might be very usefull to find "poke" address by yourself, monitoring for example life numbers. To find a new "poke address" you can proceed as follow : Let's say you're playing Prehistorik2 and you want to find the memory address where "number lives" is stored. . Start a new game in Prehistorik2 . Enter in the cheat menu. . Choose Save Ram to save initial state of the memory. . Specify the number of lives you want to find in "Scan Old Value" field. (for Prehistorik2 the initial lives number is 4) . Go back to the game and loose a life. . Enter in the cheat menu. . Specify the number of lives you want to find in "Scan New Value" field. (for Prehistorik2 the lives number is now 3) . In Add Cheat you have now one matching Address (for Prehistorik2 it's 3F30) . Specify the Poke value you want (for example 5) and add a new cheat with this address / value. The cheat is now activated in the cheat list and you can save it using the "Save cheat" menu. Restart the game and let's enjoy Prehistorik2 with infinite life !! 7. COMMENTS ------------ You can write your own comments for games using the "Comment" menu. The first line of your comments would then be displayed in the file requester menu while selecting the given file name (snapshot, disk, keyboard, settings). 8. LOADING KEY MAPPING FILES ------------ To overcome the issue, you can write your own mapping file. Using notepad for example you can edit a file with the .kbd extension and put it in the kbd directory. For the exact syntax of those mapping files, have a look on sample files already presents in the kbd directory (default.kbd etc ...). After writting such keyboard mapping file, you can load them using the main menu inside the emulator. If the keyboard filename is the same as the snapshot (.sna or .snz) or disk filename (.dsk or .dsz) then when you load this snapshot file or this disk, the corresponding keyboard file is automatically loaded ! You can now use the Keyboard menu and edit, load and save your keyboard mapping files inside the emulator. The Save option save the .kbd file in the kbd directory using the "Game Name" as filename. The game name is displayed on the right corner in the emulator menu. If you have saved the state of a game, then a thumbnail image will be displayed in the file requester while selecting any file (snapshot, disk, keyboard, settings) with game name, to help you to recognize that game later. 9. SETTINGS ------------ You can modify several settings value in the settings menu of this emulator. The following parameters are available : Sound enable : enable or disable the sound Display fps : display real time fps value Speed limiter : limit the speed to a given fps value Skip frame : to skip frame and increase emulator speed Ram size : memory size of the CPC Render mode : many render modes are available with different geometry that should covered all games requirements Render delta Y : move the center of the screen vertically Green color : green monochrome display Swap Analog/Cursor : swap key mapping between PSP analog pad and PSP digital pad Auto fire period : auto fire period Auto fire mode : auto fire mode active or not Display LR led : draw a small blue rectangle in top of the screen when trigger keys are pressed Clock frequency : PSP clock frequency, by default the value is set to 266Mhz, and should be enough for most of all games. Sound tick ratio : Increase sound tick ratio to speed up the emulator Disk startup : when a new disk is inserted the emulator can try to find the name of the filename to load and start it automatically. This option specify what to do when a new disk is inserted. Reset on startup : reset emulator when loading a disk Enjoy, Zx