Acorn Emulation Latest News

Details of all previous updates, can be downloaded in a ZIP file - recommended reading.

40 emulators and counting!

With this update I'm announcing the launch of the Acorn Emulation Competition, prizes to include copies of 6502Em and Z80Em. Read the details here and enter the competition for free today!

Paul Clifford, still not quite content with his efforts on VPCE and PCEngine is planning to rewrite PC Engine (his ARM coded PC Engine emulator) with a faster interpretive engine. Eventually he is hoping to use dynamic recompilation to get some real speed out of it, but is waiting awhile until after he's done the compiler section of his Computer Science course to see if they give any advice.

The Acorn User 200th edition is now out with the cover CD stating - "Emulators The complete collection to relive the old days". This has a whole mass of emulators on it (most of the ones available) as well as a copy of this site for you to browse offline. PC Pro 3.0 is also reviewed in the magazine.

Chockcino, WSS's implementation of a Java interpreter has finally entered beta test stage with a request for testers being posted on C.S.A.A. Chockcino is an implementation of Java v1.1 as opposed to Acorn's which was of v1.0.2 which was too old to run much of the latest software including several emulators implemented in Java.

Aleph One's PC Pro 3.0 suite for use with their hardware PC emulator cards is nearing release. it brings much wanted features to PC emulation on the Acorn particularly support for VESA 1.2 and VESA 2 video modes which will allow many PC-based emulators to run on the cards much improving Michael Koenig's list. DirectX emulation which is also used by many PC games and emulators although not included in the initial release is under development and will be provided as a free upgrade to PC Pro 3.

Retrocade was released for the PC on September 14th, the Acorn version is still in the works. I've written a short preview on the subject for the unitiated.

Alain Brobecker has added an Acorn cross development section to his website. A link is added on the Emulator Programming page.

I found a great little page on the web with a load of system ROMs for most of the systems that you could ever want to see emulated, take a look at sysrom. A link has been added to it on the Links page.

A new version of CPCemu by Andreas Stroiczek is coming eventually, with various tidy ups to improve compatibility even more, plus he's got a new webpage. He's also tidying up the source to Gameboy, so that it can be released for all to play with in a few weeks.

Michael Foot is working on BeebIt, a BBC emulator written in C. Currently 6502, System Via, User Via and video are working which means that the BBC system ROMs boot up but there is no filing system support yet.

Andreas Dehmel has released v1.4 of BreadPatch, his patch for BreadBox64 which allows it to read D64 files (C64 disk images) as Frodo can. BreadPatch wouldn't work with the recent freeware release of BreadBox64, so the new version which can work with shareware and freeware BreadBox is a welcome addition.

Gareth Moore's excellent 32 bit Acorn Gaming site is having a bit of a revamp done to it's already very good emulation section, it should be online soon.

Whilst being in touch with Mark Rison, author of !CPC, he pointed out that the last release of CPC source could even emulate a ZX81 as well. He even left some terse instructions in the manual, so if you're interested you can reconfigure the program and try running it yourself. I'll try and have more details on it at a later date.

Andreas Dehmel is to port VICE v0.15 to the Acorn. VICE emulates many of the early 8bit Commodore machines including the PET, C64, Vic20 and is one of the most accurate emulators for these platforms available. Andreas already has VICE up and running and is just perfecting the palette and tidying it up before releasing it. VICE will work in the desktop just like Andreas' other Commodore emulator port Frodo, and in fact during initial development used the same frontend. This one's gonna be good!

David McEwen has released his port of Atari 800 which will be reviewed in a later update. David has completed his port of MasterGear v1.1 and MGear has been released. A new release of David's ArcNES emulator is imminent which will feature 91, 72 in 1 and 100 in 1 mappers emulated (the first time in any NES emulator for the last two), improvements to mappers 1,4,5,7,15,16 and improved speed. Overall ArcNES is a lot more compatible and David is apparently having problems finding games which don't work.

David McEwen has done a port of Marat Fayzullin's Virtual Gameboy v0.81b a superb emulator and widely regarded as the oldest and one of the most compatible gameboy emulators around. The bad news is that the source code used was probably distributed onto the web without Marat's concent so David is not releasing his port of VGB, preferring instead to contact Marat and ask if he will allow a port of the latest code, v1.2 which even features preliminary Colour Gameboy emulation.

David's looking at porting NINCEST64 an N64 emu for the PC. Currently NINCEST64 is a fairly basic emulator, but ca run a few of the 2D demos that are around including the FireDemo. The emulator is not dynamically recompiling but is written in C so as to be able to be ported to several platforms. Unfortunately this will probably mean that perfomance will be very very slow indeed - you won't be able to play Turok! After porting several of his other emulators, David's also taking a look at Comeback 64 a rapidly developing Commodore 64 emulator.

David McEwen is planning to write ARM code CPU cores for the Z80 and 6502 chips, using the same API as Marat's cores in order that they can be plugged into the original emulator sources, which will vastly improve the speed of MGear, ColEm, fMSX, ArcNES and Replay+, as well as any other ports of emulators using Marat's (very common) cores in the future.

Rich Talbot-Watkins has resurfaced after post-graduation celebrations and has released an SMS technical document which he wrote based on the knowledge gained from writing Miracle. He's also planning to continue working on Miracle to add Game Gear compatibility, a better RISC PC compatible frontend, and better compatibility for the simpsons and zool. A new email address is now available for him, and the old cambridge uni address will no longer work.

Michael Borcherds tells me that his multi-tasking version of Z80Em is making significant progress and now as well as running in a window can also save TAP files and load TZX and VOC files as well as, "a snazzy little tape icon in the border (mouse pointer) to indicate tape status". Mike is also developing 6502Em a little more so that it now emulates split screen mode properly, but unfortunately is a bit slow on an ARM3 and hasn't had the palette corrected yet. Both versions will be available for upgrade by current owners when complete and will be able to be bought from WSS.

The generic source code to Snes9X has been updated with 2 massive new features, NetPlay and better DSP1 emulation. This means that upto 5 people can play against one another on computers linked over a network. The DSP1 chip was used in games such as Super Mario Kart, one of the best racing games on the SNES and which can now be played under emulation for the very first time. Currently only Solaris and Linux ports are available, but others such as the Acorn version should follow shortly.

Jan De Boer has released Pcr13 which, "changes SWI's that some old programs construct on the stack, into inline OS_CallASWI instructions. It knows only 8 variants, but that seems enough to make !65Host (among others) work on a StrongARM. It also fills in some fp instructions in !PCEM/!PCEmS". Take a look at Jan's Homepage.

Does no one like this site? Please vote for it at Site of the Month if you do:
http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/ajseeley/acornsite/sotm.htm
It's quite demoralizing not even being in the Top 10!

I'm off to the University of Warwick on October 3rd to start a Computer Science degree. If you have any email for me then ensure you send it to the [email protected] forwarding address so it'll reach me. There'll be an awful lot of drinking going on so I've no idea when I'll get back to this page. Hopefully it'll be sometime in November but never fear, as you can see above, the Acorn emulation scene is still alive and kicking and will remain so for a long while yet I'm sure. In the meantime, the site will live on through the Emulation Message Board and I implore the emulator authors to post updated information there for all to read, so be sure to check there for all the latest news. Whatever happens regarding the platform's future, it's been fun - long live RISC OS!

Previous update: Saturday 29/8/98 (ZIP file)