Video-Emulators

AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC – Home Computer Emulators – Week 7

Clock Signal

Clock Signal is an emulator of various 8- and 16-bit platforms. Users directly launch classic software with no emulator or per-emulated-machine learning curve. The program supports a wide range of home computers including:

  • Acorn Electron;
  • Amstrad CPC;
  • Apple II/II+ and IIe;
  • Atari 2600;
  • ColecoVision;
  • Commodore Vic-20 (and Commodore 1540/1);
  • Macintosh 512ke and Plus;
  • MSX 1;
  • Oric 1/Atmos;
  • Sega Master System; and
  • Sinclair ZX80/81.
  • Experimental support for Atari ST

This program isn’t in the Manjaro official repositories or theĀ Arch User Repository. This one I had to compile for myself. On my system, I was missing scons, a utility that builds software.

This is installed with the command:

$ sudo pacman -S scons

Next, download the file CLK-2020-07-20.tar.gz from the project’s GitHub Code Repository. Then at a terminal, compile the program with the commands:

$ tar xvf CLK-2020-07-20.tar.gz
$ cd CLK-2020-07-20/OSBindings/SDL
$ scons

Note the final command instructs the compiler (cc1plus) to only use 1 of the 4 cores. To speed up the compilation, use:

$ scons -j4

Copy the binary file to /usr/local/bin with the command:

$ cp clksignal /usr/local/bin/

With 1 core, compiling takes 9 minutes 11 seconds on the AWOW AK41. With the -j4 flag (use all 4 cores), the compilation takes a mere 3 minutes 24 seconds.

AWOW AK41 - Clock Signal
Click for full size image

This image shows a game of chess in progress with this emulator.

It’s emulating the ZX81, a home computer which has a base configuration of 1 KB of on-board memory that could be officially expanded externally to 16 KB. Yes, that’s not GB, or MB, but really KB!

Unsurprisingly, the AK41 didn’t have any problems emulating a ZX81.


Next page: Page 5 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – FS-UAE
Page 3 – ZEsarUX & Hatari
Page 4 – Clock Signal
Page 5 – Summary


Complete list of articles in this series:

AWOW AK41 Mini PC
Week 11Video consoles: SNES emulation
Week 10Running TeamViewer with AWOW AK41 as the host
Week 9Astronomy on the AK41 including Celestia, Stellarium, Skychart, and more
Week 8Recording video with OBS Studio
Week 7Home computer emulators: FS-UAE, ZEsaurUX, Hatari, Clock Signal
Week 6Web browsing with Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Vivaldi
Week 5Gaming: SuperTuxKart, AwesomeNauts, Retrocycles, Robocraft, DOTA 2, and more
Week 4Run multiple operating systems on the AK41
Week 3Video and audio playback looking at hardware acceleration
Week 2Benchmarking the AK41 with 3 other low power machines
Week 1Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro

This blog is written on the AWOW AK41 Mini PC.

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David Harper
David Harper
3 years ago

Thanks for the series about the AWOW mini PC, very informative.