Something I've been hacking together. WIP, DO NOT EXPECT IT TO WORK.

Download v0.1 (Linux) [ONLY tested on Ubuntu 24.04]

Boots the firmware and some OSes with varying degrees of success. OSes tested:

  • Gentoo - can get into rescue shell, otherwise soft hangs on decompressing squashfs (timing issues -> starvation by the look)
  • Ubuntu - soft hangs at boot (haven't investigated, maybe ISO boot kernel expects Merced or something?)
  • Debian - soft hangs at boot (ditto)
  • FreeBSD - almost gets to shell, hangs (haven't investigated)
  • Windows XP - setup runs, waaaayyyy to slow to install (shell runs with Shift + F10)

    Gentoo and NT probably got the furthest, both with shell working.

    Usage:

    1. Make NVRAM image
    ./mknvram -o nvram.bin
    2. Run bski in ZX2000 mode
    ./bski -zx2000 firmware.bin -nvram nvram.bin -zx2000mem <memory-size-in-mb> -cdrom <path-to-iso> -hd <path-to-raw-img> 2>/dev/null

    Note that if it fails to boot with a blank screen, then delete nvram.bin.bmc, if still doesn't work delete both nvram.bin and nvram.bin.bmc and regenerate NVRAM image. Deleting the .bmc is harmless, but deleting nvram.bin causes all EFI settings to be lost.

    Serial console is on stdin/stdout, emulator logs are on stderr which you may wish to redirect to /dev/null.

    To generate a hard drive image, run:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=<path-to-raw-img> bs=1M count=<size-in-mb>