Details of previous updates, can be downloaded in a ZIP file - recommended reading.
I'm sure by now you've noticed that the Acorn Emulation Page has moved from geocities to the Acorn cybervillage! There were several reasons for the fact that I felt I had to leave geocities; the irritating geostatials and geopops adverts that they insisted on having, the fairly limited space, the exhaustingly long URL, the unreliability, the illegality of CGI scripts (dynamic HTML) and the incapability of any kind of directory structure. Although the old URL http://www.come.to/emulate will continue to point to this new location (as planned) I will no longer be promoting its use. You should now bookmark this site as being at http://www.cybervillage.co.uk/acorn/emulation/. I'd like to say a big thankyou to Stuart Halliday for allowing me a few Mb of space to put this site on the Acorn Cybervillage.
Although not strictly emulation news, I thought I aught to mention that Ian Bell, original author of elite, has made versions from nearly every platform freely distributable, and downloadable from his website! Elite was such as classic game on 8bit systems, since it pushed them to the very limit in terms of graphics. This makes it particularly good for testing emulators, since in order to be fast enough, elite used many unorthodox tricks that a lot of emulators would fall down on, see the links page for the URL.
A NES emulator is now near release. David McEwen is working on porting the xNES emulator from the PC to the Acorn. Early ports are up and running (if a little glitchy), and I think we can look forward to colour Mario on the Acorn very shortly, as can be seen from the first world exclusive screenshot of xNES on the Acorn.
Davids McEwen (who has just ported fMSX and ColecoVision) has hinted that he is planning to do a port of the Apple Macintosh emulator, vMac - see the bottom of the reply he posted concerning the ColecoVision emulator on the Acorn Emulation Message board. However, he is presently having problems getting the screen display up and running, so the port may be delayed for a week or more.
I myself am looking at doing a port of madNES, the other decent portable NES emulator on the PC (since Marat won't release the iNES source). The author, Roberto Rosario has already sent me the source, and I will be looking at porting it in the coming week. More news soon.
The MESS (multiple console) emulator is now in development for multiple platforms, with Gareth Long handling the Acorn side of things, the first console that is being emulated is the NES. The emulator is being named as the follow up to MAME, and if this is even half true, then we're in for a real treat!
I've come across 3 more new java emulators of; the MSX and 2 arcade games; Phoenix and Pleiads, which since being written in java are now available for users on many platforms to use, not least the Acorn. If someone could please tell me how well these work on an Acorn, and could provide me with a screenshot, I'd be very grateful! I've also heard rumours of a java colecovision emulator - more news as I get it.
On the links page, I've updated the link to Gareth Moore's emulation pages, to include his emulation features, and not just the archive page. I've also added the convergence banner (I've been a member for months and forgot to add the logo). I've added a link to the self-decompressing copy of SparkPlug, to allow users to get hold of the decompresser for all the archives held on this site. The AEP has now joined the Acorn Banner exchange, a superb idea to advertise Acorn sites to other Acorn users. I've improved the spectrum page, adding information about the Speculator (very old speccy emulator). There is also a new Acorn Emulation Page banner (see below), which you can use to link to the AEP from your page if you like, simply link the graphic to http://www.cybervillage.co.uk/acorn/emulation/banner.gif
I've added some more bits and pieces to the emulator authors page, such as source code for the ADAMem coleco vision emulator, and Pleiads arcade emulator (mentioned above) and PC Atari 2600 emulator. I've contacted the author of the rapidly developing multi-platform Boycott Gameboy emulator concerning porting it to the Acorn, and he is willing to allow it to be ported. If you are interested, it is being written in C++, contact me, and I'll send you more details.
For the next version of STem, the Atari ST emulator, Sam has already got blitter chip emulation going (which speeds up graphics), one of the MFP chip timers working accurately (to allow benchmark speed testers to work better), we can expect faster screen updating, and a small unnoticable speed increase :o). Unfortunately there are still a lot of problems with getting the mouse working correctly in the desktop, which Sam is having a lot of difficulty with.
Over the next few weeks, I am intending to put together a fairly in depth page about emulator authoring, although I do not have a great deal of experience in this area myself, I have a fair idea of what goes into an emulator. I am looking for submissions of small descriptions, concerning problems associated with emulator authoring and porting. Small code examples, such as how to make words big/little endian, how to get round porting emulators that use the allegro library, or how to do check key presses very quickly (ie, without OS_Byte 121) are all welcome. If I get enough support for this project, it may well take off and be very helpful to many people, but I am looking to the programmers amongst you to help me with the hard work! Please send your hints and tips to me at this address. I'm pleased to say that my last attempt at launching new feature worked very well, and the Acorn Emulation Message board, received over 1500 hits in its first month in existence!
Previous update: Friday 6/2/98 (ZIP file)