This page differs from the others on this site, in that it is about emulators for other platforms, that emulate an Acorn. Some of the emulation is a little low level at the moment, but progress is being made!
Red Squirrel by Graeme Barnes is an Acorn machine emulator for Windows. It works in much the same way as Archie though is much more flexible being able to operate within a Windows window (see screenshot below) or full screen. The emulator can 'capture' the Windows mouse pointer so that you feel like you are operating entirely within the emulator whilst easily able to escape back to Windows. Red Squirrel is only able to read disk images as opposed to real ADFS format floppies (as Archie can do by operating in DOS) though in practice this tends not to be too much of a problem. Red Squirrel also sports its own PC filing system called HostFS which allows access to the PC hard disc, a very valuable feature given how closely it allows the two environments to interact quickly and easily.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Red Squirrel project is that development has continued to emulate not just an A5000-level computer but a full Risc PC. Indeed the emulation has progressed to a stage where RISC OS versions 3.70 (shown below) and 4 are now able to run on the emulator in experimental versions that are available to try 'at your own risk'.
Development of Red Squirrel is continuing with plans for support for more RISC OS machines and better compatibility. Speed is still an issue but features such as dynamic recompilation are being examined to try and improve this. Given Microsoft's aversion to DOS-support in all future versions of Windows, the arrival of Red Squirrel to supercede Archie is a welcome development and is already the only Acorn emulator for users of Windows 2000.
Red Squirrel homepage
Alternative link
Chris
Lloyd's Archie is an A440 emulator for the PC under DOS has the prestigious achievement
of being the first widely usable Acorn emulator which is able to run the
RISC OS desktop. The compatibility level which Archie has
achieved is truly astounding, capable of running many games and demos,
let alone the familiar Acorn desktop. The emulator can now even read and
write ADFS D/E format floppy disks as well as disk images.
Hard disc image support is present as is PCFS, a method of accessing the PC hard drive as if it were an ADFS format hard disc providing large amounts of storage. The emulator allows the expanded Quad MEMC emulation available to the A5000 which allows upto 16Mb of RAM. Sound is supported but is still 'experimental' i.e. ok but don't expect too much, the familiar beep of RISC OS booting is very recognisable. Even parallel port output has been added allowing printing to a printer attached to the PC.
To be able to take advantage of the emulator you'll need a copy of the RISC OS ROMs for v2 or 3 or Arthur which can be ripped very easily from your real Archie (read the instructions in the help file) but without them you won't be able to get very far and certainly won't be able to run any desktop or multiple-file programs.
The compatibility of the emulator is now very good and most programs that you throw at it will run fine. I personally have played a bit of Chocks Away, I wouldn't say it was quite perfect and is noticeably slower, but it was certainly playable. I estimate that running the emulator on my P2-450MHz PC it runs at something just over half the speed of my A5000. Not blindingly fast I agree, but certainly usable and there's apparently room for improvement.
Chris has done a superb job in getting Archie this far and has worked very hard on an extremely difficult task, for which he is to be commended. Please don't hassle him asking for ROM images or software, instead, send him bug reports detailing software you've found which works/doesn't work and how it goes wrong/how it performs. It's only with feedback like this that the emulator will progress. It's not quite a perfect Archie on your PC, but its a very good step in the right direction and a truly amazing piece of software!
Archie
Archie
homepage
Resources:
http://madjock.emulationworld.com/
http://come.to/sysrom
The infamous Lander running on Archie on my PC
AcornEmu by Rob
Pattenden is a simple Acorn emulator for Windows 95. It boots up the
BASIC interpreter, and can then load, save, run BASIC programs
just like on a normal Acorn. The emulator has simple graphics capabilities,
but there are several small bugs still with the emulation, since other
programs I've tried come up with perculiar errors not present on my A5000.
The emulator is quite nice in that it goes to the trouble of using the
actual Acorn system font and although still a little buggy is still fairly
good. It's not up to the compatibility nor the speed of Archie (and is
very slow in comparison), but is another promising emulator that could
go far with a little more work. Beware though, the installation procedure
is a little more involved than most, and if you don't already have DirectX5,
probably isn't worth the bother (check c:\Program Files\directx\setup\Dxtool.exe
if you're not sure). At the moment the emulator is also incredibly slow
(we're talking a pause between keypress and appearance on screen) because
of the limited optimisation, but things will hopefully improve soon.
AcornEmu homepage
The Arm2 emulator by Edwin Dorr is an emulator for all ARM 2 instructions to run on a PC under DOS. However, the Archimedes RISCOS and hardware support is very poor. The 'kernel' emulates only the swi's needed to get the basic rom started! It does come with version 1.04 of ARM BBC BASIC V, and can be used to program in BASIC, run the programs, it can then save/load the tokenised BASIC files on your PC without any problems at all, and these are identical to any produced on a real Acorn. A quick test to try and draw a circle in BASIC proved what I suspected, that the emulator is text only, and isn't capable of displaying any graphics. Unfortunately the author will not be developing this emulator anymore, but it is quite a nifty piece of code. A disassembler and debugger is supplied, as well as the full C source code for all programs. By the looks of it, the source even has macros to allow it to be set up to compile on an Acorn!
ARM2 emulator (and
source code)
BBC Lives
page about ARM2
The Archimedes Emulator (ArcEm) by David Alan Gilbert, now at v0.40, uses the GPL release of the ARMulator v1.0 by ARM Ltd (see below) and emulates an archimedes somewhere around A3xx and A4xx series. It runs under unix, and has been tested on a PC under Linux and on a Sun under SunOS. Some of the more major hardware features are emulated, MEMC, VIDC, CMOS RAM, IOC but it is by no means perfect. At this time there is no port to Windows.
At the moment, the emulator is supplied with a version of ARM Linux, a freely distributable OS, as it would be illegal to distribute a copy of the RISC OS ROMs, as to whether it can run RISC OS, David Gilbert tells me that, "it's amazing what will run on this emulator". Although not in full development, some tweaks are being made to the program from time to time, especially with a view to improving the speed. At present ArcEm emulates at around 3MHz, which makes it usable, on a 533MHz Alpha running Linux. I have also heard of ArcEm running on a P266MMX under Linux at an estimated 15% of A5000 speed, which is apparently very slow but usable.
Click
on the thumbnail to view a screenshot (1280x1024 GIF
file 46Kb) of ArcEm running on a DEC Alpha, you can see the emulator
window on the right, with a status window above it showing the state of
the keyboard and floppy LEDs. In the emulator window you can see Dave Gilbert
logging into ARM Linux, it displaying (some rather old and outdated information)
and then display /proc/cpuinfo which tells you about the CPU it thinks
its running on. In the bottom left you can see /proc/cpuinfo of the host
machine the alpha for instance.
ArcEm
ftp area
Dave Gilbert's
home page
Various ARM
GNU utilities
The
ARM Linux page
There is also the ARMulator, written by Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) themselves, it emulates and ARM6, and the C source code is available for download below. I suspect it will act like the ARM 2 emulator above, but will understand the ARM 6 instruction set.
ARMulator ARM6 emulator source