Details of previous updates, can be downloaded in a ZIP file - recommended reading.
The Acorn Emulator page is back with another major revamp (despite me having exams all week). Some of the page layout has changed, there's several new pages, but most importantly there's more news of the new emulators!
MAME v0.30.1 is coming up to being released soon (only a week later than 0.30.0) as there are some small bugs, in the program, such as not being able to laod the game cheat files. The -fm parameter will also be available in the 0.30.1 to disable the FM hardware, which Acorn computers don't have.
There's another very simple to use MAME frontend, written by Richard Sharpe (no relation), you might like to take a look.
Gareth Long is looking for somewhere to relocated MAME to on a permanent basis, since his demon account keeps going over the 25MBytes/day limit, which is causing real problems. If you can help out you might like to email him, but please don't suggest Geocities or one of the other free pages (they're not very permanent!).
The first stage of my Babe emulator, of the Manchester Mark 1 (world's first stored-program computer) is now available for download. I am developing a fully integrated Assembler/Disassembler and Emulator for the machine which is 50 years old this year! Manchester University (where the original machine was developed) is running a highly rewarding prize for programmers, so you might like to take a look at the Babe page.
I discovered a rather nice picture of an AppleMac emulator on the Acorn the other day. Except that it wasn't an AppleMac emulator, it was a PC program called Executor running under the PC emulator. What Executor does is to take Mac code, and convert it (by way of a dynamic recompiler I believe) to enable it to run at decent speeds on a PC. This then apparently works at a reasonable speed on the Acorn PC card.
Apparently Richard Talbot-Watkins and Matthew Godbolt are both working on the new Master System emulator. There is some more details about the new emulator on the SMS page. Expect a 1st release in the next month or 2!!!
The STem page seems to be back, since 13/1/98, now the Southampton uni's got its act together (maybe they turn it off over christmas!?) no new page updates as yet, but hopefully any time now.
The megadrive emulator is nearing completion, and the company (if you can't guess already) who are backing the emulator have received a working copy, that runs Sonic! At the moment the emulator is very slow, only upto 18 fps (deliberately) because of all the debugging bits running along side it, and complete lack of optimisation, but hopefully it should be ready in the near future.
Paul Clifford's new PC Engine emulator is also getting near completion, apparently running at upto 75fps on a StrongARM, compared to 60fps for the real thing, and that's still with all the debugging code in there, and some more optimisation to do! Sound emulation is also almost perfect! The email I received is posted on the AE Message Board. I've also received a couple of screenshots of the PCEngine emulator in action, they're up on the PCEngine page now.
Unfortunately due to legal reasons, Paul can no longer be connected to VPCE to the Acorn, and therefore version 0.30 remains unported, is anyone prepared to do the port??? See the PCEngine page for more details.
Michael Koenig suggested that it might be fairly simple to write a 3DO emulator, since the main CPU was an ARM, there shouldn't be too much hardware to emulate! If anyone has any comment, ideas, lists of 3DO information then I'd be interested to hear from them (and yes, it was a very unsuccessful console).
I've had a very nice screenshot of jasper supplied to me, it shows the java spectrum emulator running in the ANT browser on a RISC PC. The Java Virtual Machine, is the one from the Clan's Acorn World beta test CD, but I know very little about it, so please don't ask me how to get it working.
I've added a new page about using emulators written for other platforms, particularly PC, under a PC emulator on the Acorn. There are several emulators that have already been tested (bad news- PlayStation emulator doesn't work) but there are many more that I would really like people to test, if you have a PC card, please, just test some of the emulators out, and tell me how you get on - does it work? Since this page has been created, I've moved the Psion link (and now the AppleMac link) from the index page to this foreign emulators page, so that the index is now true Acorn emulators only. Emulators reviewed or to be reviewed soon include: many BBC emus, Genecyst, KGen, SNES9x, Apple Mac, ST, NESticle, NoCashGB (multiplayer gameboy emu), PlayStation emulator, N64 emu, Massage, and many more!!
The New Acorn Emulation Message board is now up and running, it's a nice little place where users of emulators can post messages about emulation that are viewable by everyone. Previously emulation news tended to get placed in comp.sys.acorn.games, but I'm hoping that everyone will now be able to post messages here for the world to see. I'll be putting information up there in between page updates, to tell you what to look forward to. Rumours, questions, links and much more will also be placed there. So check back regularly (daily) to see what's new. Until it really takes off on its own, I'll also copy messages concerning emulation posted in comp.sys.acorn.whatever to the board, so that you only have to go to one place to get all the latest information. All the emulator authors are very supportive of the idea, so hopefully it should be a great success.
I've added thumbnails for all screens above about 30Kb, before there was just a text link, but thumbnails are very helpful in evaluating use of that precious bandwidth! More use of tables to improve layout, is this compat with your browser?
A frames version of the page is now default. following Steve Mumford's complaint in Acorn User that the page is a little hard to navigate, I've moved all the main index links that used to be on the front page, to the menu bar frame down the left of the browser. If you're browser doesn't support frames, then there is also a no frames version available. I've tried to ensure that any links to pages off the AEP will then remove the menu bar, so that the new page is fully viewable, please inform me if this is not the case.
In the old news archive, as well as all the standard copies of this news page from days gone by, I've also put a copy of the acorn emulation page, as it was when it was just 1 page on emulation. Even back in those days it was still pretty good, but nothing like the encyclopedia of knowledge you see before you now :o)
I've spoken to someone at Acorn about the possibility of releasing a patched copy of 65Host, but since the patch isn't that stable, perhaps it isn't such a good idea. The person I spoke to felt that others in the company would take a very dim view of such a practice - ivory towers?!?!
I think I've managed to find a solution to one of the longer standing problems on the AEP technical problems page. Tony Hopstaken was having difficulty loading archives from BBC Lives into the 6502Em from WSS. However, Gareth Moore has written a small utility to decompress these archives, I've moved a copy to this site, and it is available from the BBC page, however it might be worth checking Gareth Moore's pages for more details.
The Dump's back with over 500 Megadrive games, and several hundred PC Engine games, and now on the links page.
Previous update: Monday 12/1/98 (ZIP file)