JOYCE : Frequently Asked Questions

What can it emulate at the moment?

• The Z80 CPU. I'm using Ian Collier's Z80 core from xz80.
• The screen.
• The keyboard.
• The floppy disc controller - enough of it to support the Amstrad BIOS. Floppies are emulated with disc image files.
• The Centronics ports.
• The CPS8256 serial interface.
• The PCW8256 dot-matrix printer.
• The PCW9512 daisywheel printer.
• AMX or Kempston mice.
• The Electric Studio light pen.
• The beeper.
• LocoLink, either to another emulator, or to a real computer (Linux 2.4+ is required for this).

What can't it emulate?

Not much.

What can it do that a real PCW can't?

• Change the screen colours. Ever fancy purple text and an orange screen? Well, maybe not, but it's possible.
• Emulated hard drive. Up to 100Mb under LocoScript or 40Mb under CP/M.
• 100x36 colour text screen, using the SVGA.
• 800x600 colour graphics screen (available through LOGO or GSX).
• Use a UNIX directory as a CP/M drive, for easy file sharing.

Where can I find images of the boot discs?

To the best of my knowledge, you can't. They are copyrighted software and can't be distributed.

If you've got a PCW with only a 3" drive, LocoScript Software have various products that can be used to transfer data between a PCW and a PC. You need to get DU54 onto the PCW, make the images, and transfer them back to the PC.

How do I get printed output?

It depends if you have a native PCW driver for your printer.

• If you do, then the best way is to make your printer appear as an add-on parallel printer (using, for example, the emulated CPS8256).
• Otherwise, if you're running Linux, then use an emulated built-in printer, with output format set to Postscript and the output sent to "Unix command: lpr".
• If you're using the development version (v2.1.x) under Windows, then you can set the built-in printer to output using the Windows GDI. This will then emulate printed output directly.
• If you're using v2.0.1 or earlier under Windows, you have to use the emulated 8256 dot-matrix printer, with the output format set to PNG. Then use another program to print the resulting PNG files.

Why does the Windows version store its files in the "My Documents" directory?

Because on a multi-user system, there is only one "Program Files" directory, but each user has their own "My Documents" directory. Thus each user can have their own settings for JOYCE.

On the other hand, if you don't like it, you can go into the JOYCE settings menu and set the JOYCE data directory to "Program Files".

Why doesn't JOYCE compile on my Linux system?

JOYCE was originally written to use a cut-down version of the Standard Template Library (ministl). This isn't quite compatible with the full STL supplied with most recent Linux systems. The latest development versions use the host system's STL by default; you may get on better compiling one of them.