Short:        High-level Commodore 65 emulator
Author:       devilmaster@email.com (Simone Gremmo), port by uploader
Uploader:     polluks+aminet sdf lonestar org (Stefan Haubenthal)
Type:         misc/emu
Version:      6
Architecture: ppc-morphos; other
URL:          http://devilmaster.altervista.org/hi65.html

Hi65 is a high-level Commodore 65 emulator.

In order to understand what "high-level" means, let's first consider what a
"low-level" emulator does.  It implements a software version of the whole
machine, including a virtual processor that executes machine language
commands.  When any software for the target platform is loaded into the
virtual RAM, the virtual processor executes it instruction by instruction.

However, the Commodore 65 is not the ideal platform for a low-level
approach:  each of the few units around has a different implementation of
its ROM software, the implementations themselves are buggy and there is no
commercial software around.  The authors of MESS want to emulate the
Commodore 65 with a low-level approach, but that has been a failure:  the
C65 driver of MESS has had the same bugs for over a decade, bugs that do
*not* appear in the actual C65 prototypes.  Emulating the Commodore 65 with
a low-level approach is not "accurate" and it's more than pedantic:  it's a
self-defeating task.

Enter Hi65.

Hi65 does not implement a virtual version of the 4510 CPU (used in the
physical Commodore 65), nor does it execute machine code software:  it
executes tokenized BASIC 10 programs directly, as if the various BASIC
tokens were machine code instructions for its own virtual processor.  Thus,
the execution is much faster because it's not limited to the clock speed of
the 4510 (but the timing is still accurate) and it's not limited by the
scarce knowledge of the inner workings of the Commodore 65, because all
instructions are made to do what the manual says they should do, not what
they actually do on a physical machine (which may be buggy and inconsistent
between individual machines).

Hi65 (the emulator), Hi65CFG (the command line configuration software) and
Hi65 Edit and Launch Tool (the graphical frontend) are released under
version 3 of the GPL (GNU General Public License).  If you do not have a
copy of the license, go to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html to read it.