Tip: Getting Fuse ZX Spectrum Emulator running on a Raspberry Pi

UPDATE: With Rasbian there is now a much easier way to get it working, see this post

Since getting my Raspberry Pi one of things I wanted to get working on it was the Fuse Spectrum emulator, I am not sure why exactly but there is something about the spirit of the Pi that takes me back the era of the 8 bit computer.

Having only had limited experience of Linux in the past it was a challenge to get it working, but I always find that you learn the most by trial and error. The best resource for the getting things working with the Pi is the forums on RaspberryPi.org, I found all the information I needed in various places on the site.

Coming from a Windows world I am used to downloading a setup file and quickly installing it but that is not the case with the Pi, you need to download the emulator source files and libraries and the compile them to get it working. I am using Debian “squeeze” Linux on the Pi, the instructions for Arch Linux are slightly different and are also available on the forum.

The first thing I did was download the Fuse source and libspectrum and then extract them to the root folder, I did this by using the Midori browser to download the files and then right clicking on the files and using the extract option. Once I had the source file the next step is to compile them. I tried this but it kept falling over as it was running out of memory, in the thread on the forums there was a nice tip on how to get round this:

A further useful tip; if you find yourself running into memory-related errors at all when building programs for Arch, first of all try doing it again without starting LXDE up. If that fails, type:

cd /boot

cp start.elf start.elf.backup

This will create a backup copy of the start.elf file Arch uses by default (which controls how the memory is split)

Then type:

cp arm224_start.elf start.elf

This will replace the default with an .elf that allocates more memory (224Mb) to Linux on startup than the GPU, so reboot.

Try to compile your program again. If it still fails you’re out of luck for now sadly.

After you are done, simply put the default .elf back by typing:

cp start.elf.backup start.elf

And reboot. Works for some problem compiles anyway.

So to get the complete working I used the following instructions taken from the forum (make sure you run all the following from the command line and don’t have the GUI running)

5) cd libspectrum-1.0.0

6) ./configure

7) make

8 ) sudo make install

9) cd ../fuse-1.0.0.1a

10) ./configure

11) make

12) sudo make install

13) for some reason it doesn’t search the right location for libspectrum so “export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib”.  I’m sure there should be an option on the configure to fix this

Now your ready to give a game a try, you can downloaded them from wordofspectrum.org. Download the file and drop it into the fuse library.

To start the emulator with a Atic Atac I ran: fuse –no-sound -t aticatac.tzx -g 2x, to start without a game and use the command: fuse –no-sound and then press F1 once it has loaded to bring up the menu.

I couldn’t get sound working and if I tried to run it without the –no-sound option Fuse would not start so still have some work to do on that. The emulator works really well and was very smooth, if nothing else I have learnt about get source code compiled. I think this is what the Raspberry Pi is all about, tinkering with Linux and learning along the way and it helps that I get to play Atic Atac at the end of the day.