BitMagic The Complete Development Environment for the Commander X16.

ROM

The Commander X16 ROM contains licensed code, so you’ll need to obtain your own copy before using the emulator. BitMagic needs ROM version R46 or later.

There are three ways to get one:

  • Run x16e --fetch-rom (or X16E --fetch-rom from a downloaded build). It downloads the latest ROM release from the x16-rom repository and saves rom.bin to your BitMagic folder: %LOCALAPPDATA%\BitMagic on Windows, ~/.local/share/BitMagic on Linux. That’s all the emulator needs. The same scripts are in a downloaded build’s folder as fetch-rom.bat and fetch-rom.sh; pass a folder as the first argument to save rom.bin somewhere else.
  • Download and install the latest version of the Official Emulator, which comes bundled with a rom.bin.
  • Clone the official ROM repository and build it manually. This can be done on Windows using WSL; just remember to install a recent version of Python!

Only --fetch-rom puts rom.bin where BitMagic’s emulator will find it automatically. With the other two, you have a rom.bin but need to tell BitMagic where it is: the easiest way is to copy it into your BitMagic folder above. Otherwise, point at it with --rom, set romFile in the project file, or set the environment variable BITMAGIC_ROM to its full path.

The emulator looks for a ROM in this order:

  1. --rom
  2. rom.bin in the current folder
  3. BITMAGIC_ROM, either the file or the folder containing it
  4. your BitMagic folder

Note: the BitMagic folder is only used by the standalone emulator. The debugger doesn’t look there, so for debugging set romFile in the project file or set BITMAGIC_ROM.