The week got off to a slow start as I found myself spending much of Monday writing up the remainder of week 3. Beyond that, I spent time putting a final base coat of paint on the sign for our friend’s coffee shop, briefly revisited the world of Psion emulation, and set my intentions for the week ahead.

Psion ROMs

Nigel, the Psion community’s resident MAME expert, has been on a renewed push to get folks to dig out their Psions (not something that needs much encouragement), check their ROM versions, and dump them if they’re not already on record.

Much to my surprise, neither of the builds on my Revo Plus or Series 7 had been dumped, so I broke out PsiROMx and set about rectifying this travesty. Fortunately, the process of dumping an EPOC32 ROM is easy: simply select ‘Save ROM’ and specify the output location. (There seem to be some issues dumping Series 5mx Pro devices, but there are still many earlier devices we need to archive, and PsiROMx serves us well here.)

PsiROMx’s interface is wonderfully simple

I uploaded these two new ROMs to the Psion-ROM archive on GitHub and was rewarded not long after by the following screenshots of my Revo Plus ROM running in MAME:

Since I was already poking around in the Psion-ROM repository, I also took a few minutes to set up automated builds that package ROMs for use with MAME—I’d love to a establish a single source of ROMs for MAME-based Psion emulation and use this in PsiEmu to make it easy for folks to get started.

Next Steps

Having seen some indication that the hanging issues I’ve been seeing with my website builds might be a bug in InContext—my static site builder—I’ve decided to focus on that for the week. Beyond debugging the hang, I have a growing list of fixes and improvements to make and, if time permits, I’d love to flesh out the Linux support.