BeebEm is a BBC Micro and Master 128 emulator. It enables you to run BBC Micro software on your PC. BeebEm was first developed for Unix systems in 1994 by Dave Gilbert and was then ported to Microsoft Windows. BeebEm should work on most PC systems running Windows XP or later.
The hardware emulated by BeebEm is that of a standard BBC Micro Model B, a Model B with IntegraB board, Model B Plus or Master 128. Optional 65C02 and other types of second processor are also emulated. The emulation is accurate enough to run most software.
Binaries are available from the Releases page in GitHub or from Mike Wyatt's BeebEm homepage.
For more information on how to use BeebEm, see the BeebEm help at Help\index.html.
The source code for BeebEm is available at https://github.com/stardot/beebem-windows.
If you want to compile BeebEm yourself then you will need Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 or later (the free VS2019 Community edition will compile BeebEm). The following project files are included:
| File | Description |
|---|---|
BeebEm.sln |
Solution file |
BeebEm.vcxproj |
BeebEm project file |
Hardware\Watford\Acorn1770.vcxproj |
Acorn 1770 FDC project file |
Hardware\Watford\OpusDDOS.vcxproj |
Opus DDOS FDC project file |
Hardware\Watford\Watford.vcxproj |
Watford FDC project file |
InnoSetup\Installer.vcxproj |
Inno Setup installer project file |
ZipFile\ZipFile.vcxproj |
Distribution zip project file |
These project files are set up to target Windows XP, which we use to create release binaries. This requires the following optional Visual Studio 2019 components to be installed:
- MSVC v140 - VS 2015 C++ build tools (v14.00)
- C++ Windows XP Support for VS 2017 (v141) tools [Deprecated]
You also will need to download and install the Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK (June 2010).
To build the installer from within Visual Studio, you'll need to download and install Inno Setup 5.6.1.
To build the distribution BeebEm.zip from within Visual Studio, you'll need to install Perl, e.g., Strawberry Perl.
After installing the DirectX 9.0 SDK and Inno Setup, the next step is to configure the BeebEm Visual Studio project to find the relevant files.
Rename the file Src\BeebEm.user.props.example to Src\BeebEm.user.props, and then open BeebEm.sln in Visual Studio.
Select the View menu, then Other Windows, then Property Manager. In the Property Manager window, click to expand BeebEm\Release | Win32 and then double-click on BeebEm.user.
This opens the BeebEm.user properties. Select User Macros from the list in the left column, under Common Properties, then set the following macro values:
-
Set DXSDK_Dir to the path to the DirectX SDK, e.g:
Name: DXSDK_Dir Value: C:\Program Files\Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)
-
Set ISCC_Dir to the path to the Inno Setup compiler, e.g:
Name: ISCC_Dir Value: C:\Program Files\Inno Setup 5
The "Set this macro as an environment variable in the build environment" option does not need to be ticked.
This version of BeebEm will not compile on Unix systems. This may change at some point but for now if you want to run BeebEm on Unix please download a Unix specific version of BeebEm.
Thanks to Dave Gilbert for originally creating BeebEm. There's an interview with Dave about the early development of BeebEm on YouTube.
Thanks to Mike Wyatt for his contributions to BeebEm and for hosting the BeebEm homepage.
Thanks to the maintainers and contributors for its continued development: Alistair Cree, Bill Carr, Charles Reilly, Chris Needham, David Sharp, Daniel Beardsmore, Dominic Beesley, Greg Cook, Jon Welch, Jonathan Harston, Ken Lowe, Kieran Mockford, Laurie Whiffen, Mauro Varischetti, Mike Wyatt, Nigel Magnay, pstnotpd, Rich Talbot-Watkins, Richard Broadhurst, Richard Gellman, Rob O'Donnell, Robert Schmidt, Steve Inglis, Steve Insley, Steve Pick, Tadek Kijkowski, Theo Lindebaum.
Copyright (C) 1994-2023 David Alan Gilbert and contributors.
BeebEm is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as described in COPYRIGHT.txt.