XTCE-Blue is a fork of reenigne's XTCE 8088 emulator providing video emulation, an SDL3 interface and an ImGui-based debugger.
XTCE is a cycle-interruptable, microcode-based 8088 emulation core. It was developed by the brilliant demo-coder reenigne, one of the programmers behind such amazing demos as 8088 MPH and Area 5150. He designed it to simulate the operation of his IBM 5160 in a cycle-exact manner, down to each DRAM refresh cycle.
As an author of another cycle-accurate PC emulator, MartyPC, I have admired the audacity to execute the 8088's microcode directly, especially since reenigne was the first person to decode it.
Unfortunately, the massive technical accomplishment that XTCE represents has been somewhat overlooked considering that XTCE lacks such amenities as a display, floppy disk controller, or even a keyboard. This limits its reach to the most hardcore of retro programmers looking for a powerful research tool.
With reenigne's blessing I aimed to take XTCE and make a fully fleshed out demonstration emulator out of it - and so XTCE-Blue was born.
XTCE-Blue integrates several device implementations ported from MartyPC, including its precise, overscan-aware CGA emulation.
- Create a clean, well-commented C++ reference emulator for cycle-accurate emulation of the IBM PC/XT.
- Demonstrate a modern debugging GUI with ImGui for a PC emulator
- Run 8088 MPH and Area 5150!
- Be a long-term project
- I don't intend to give up development of my flagship emulator, MartyPC. MartyPC has over three years of blood sweat and tears poured into it, and I will continue to improve it into the future.
- Once XTCE-Blue has proven accurate enough to run the ultimate gauntlet of Area 5150, development on it will likely stop.
- You are encouraged to submit PRs to improve the emulator's accuracy, but issues lacking a PR will unlikely be addressed.
- You are strongly encouraged to fork the entire project to make the emulator of your dreams!
- CPU status display with registers, flags, prefetch queue contents, microcode state and more
- Stepping by CPU cycle or by instruction boundaries (a bit glitchy still).
- Single code execution breakpoint (CS:IP)
- Memory viewer
- VRAM viewer
- Stack display
- Instruction disassembly display
- Video card status display
Currently, XTCE-Blue has emulation of the following devices:
- Intel 8088 CPU
- Intel 8253 Programmable Interrupt Timer
- Intel 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller
- Intel 8255 Programmable Peripheral Interface
- Intel 8237 Programmable DMA Controller
- IBM Color Graphics Adapter
- IBM Floppy Disk Controller (NEC u765)
- IBM Model F Keyboard
What it is currently lacking:
- Serial Port(s)
- Parallel Ports(s)
- Game Port
- Keyboard jankiness
- Slowdowns in 8088MPH and Area 5150 under heavy IO activity
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 fails to load
- Ken Shirriff for his invaluable analysis of the 8088
- Omar Cornut for the excellent Dear ImGui library
- Blargg for the Blip_Buffer waveform synthesis library