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Quick start guide for Linux users

Installing the emulator

Getting the emulator

Obtain the X16 emulator by downloading the most recent version from the 'releases' page in Github: https://github.com/X16Community/x16-emulator/releases Choose the correct version for your CPU architecture.

Alternative builds or other platform

If for any reason you cannot run the official release of the emulator, there's a Snap package of it that you could try instead, available at https://snapcraft.io/x16emu

It should avoid any shared library version incompatibilities that you could potentially run into with the official version, and is available for a broad range of platforms. Details and instructions on how to install this are on the linked page.

Ofcourse, you could also compile the emulator from source, but that is outside the scope of this guide.

Installing the emulator and preparing for use

  • Extract the .zip file containing the emulator into an appropriate location such as ~/x16/emulator/. For the rest of this guide we will assume this as the install location.
  • This directory should now contain at least x16emu (the emulator itself) and rom.bin (the X16 system rom). You can ignore all other files in the zip file for now.
  • Make sure the emulator is executable: chmod u+x ~/x16/emulator/x16emu

Create a place for the programs

Programs for the X16 will usually be stored on an SD memory card that the system sees as the main disk drive. The emulator can use an SD card image file to replicate this, but we are not going to use this feature now, because the emulator can also use a regular directory on your computer as the disk drive for the X16. Notice that the X16 usually expects the file names to be in UPPERCASE.

  • Create a disk directory that will be the X16's storage location: mkdir ~/x16/disk

Convenient launching

The emulator has many options to tweak its behavior. To avoid having to retype these every time, we'll be using a small shell script to launch the emulator.

  • Create a launch script somewhere (for example ~/x16/startemu) with the following: 
    #!/usr/bin/env sh
~/x16/emulator/x16emu -fsroot ~/x16/disk -scale 2 $*
  • make the script executable: chmod u+x ~/x16/startemu

Installing programs on the 'disk'

The X16 is capable of using subdirectories. This can be used to avoid cluttering the disk contents with files from different programs together in a single location. Instead, create a directory for each program and the files it needs.

  • assume we have a game called "kart" and it comes in a zip file that contains the game program, the music and the graphics files.
  • create a directory for the game: mkdir ~/x16/disk/KART Remember that the X16 usually needs directories and file names in UPPER CASE.
  • extract the zip file into that directory.

Running programs on the X16

  • start the emulator with the launch script
  • on the X16, go to the directory containing the program: DOS"CD:/DIRNAME"
  • load and run the desired program: LOAD"GAME", followed by RUN