In my RC2014 Mini on MAME post this was one of the things I was planning to try next, and once again there was an existing driver that had most of the pieces in place – evmbug.cpp implementing the TMS 9995 Evaluation Module (aka TMAM 6095).

My first job was getting the existing driver working, which meant getting the ROMs sorted out. I found that the ROM config didn’t quite match the board, so I made some changes and got myself a working EVMBUG monitor. From there it was a short step to HELLO WORLD:

For the TMS 9995 Breadboard System (which I’ve previously made using RC2014 modules) I needed to add a revised memory map for the larger RAM, and the selection of ROMs for EVMBUG, BASIC, Forth etc. My pull request for tms9995bb has been merged, so it will be in the next release of MAME.

At this stage the one thing I’d like to change is the serial driver support. At the moment the driver isn’t using the TMS9902 UART (because it doesn’t support the broader rs232 system in MAME), meaning that the terminal is directly connected into an I/O port. The consequence of that is that it’s not possible to run the emulation headless and connect another terminal emulator, which turns out to be essential if you want to paste code in – something I’ve been trying out getting CP/M working with the gscpm driver. But more on that in another post.