Acorn Emulation Latest

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

Tuesday 21/4/98

Sorry if I've been a bit slow on the big news, but having worked through the night last night and just having printed out over 4000 lines of BASIC I think I deserve a well-earned break. I've also just started work on a new Acorn-orientated web page that will be uploaded to the old location of the Acorn Emulation Page sometime soon. I thought I might try and contribute something more tot he Acorn world, seeing as this site seems fairly popular, just having past its 15,000th hit the other day.

The big news this update is that xNES is finally here!!!! David McEwens port of this Nintendo Entertainment System emulator is the first of its kind on the Acorn platform. To compliment this new ability to play NES games on your Acorn, I've added a few more NES ROM links.

The next version of Miracle, the Sega Master System emulator will feature a multi-tasking mode, Matt Godbolt announced today on the Message Board. A fairly major bug has also been fixed that was affecting Sagaia and a few other games, other bug fixes are being sorted out, and apparently the new version is nearly finished. There have been mutterings on c.s.a.g. that Gareth Moore's port of MasterGear is faster and more fluid than Miracle on a StrongARM (though I can't test this out myself). My recommendation is to get both and try whichever works best for you, though if you don't have a StrongARM, it's bound to be Miracle.

An official announcement said that MAME v0.31 is entering the last week of testing and should be out very shortly with exactly 132 new games!!!

I've updated the Acorn Emulation Archive with the latest versions of Babe and ColEm, as well as xNES.

MESS, the multiple console emulator has a new webpage up, with some screenshots! Look out for it sometime soon after May 8th when Gareth Long (who's in charge of the Acorn side of things) gets back from Texas.

David McEwen has released a new version (v0.20) of his port of ColEm. It now runs fine on older machines (pre-RISCPC) and even my nice little A5000 will play ball (albeit very slowly). There have been some tidy ups so it's possibly very slightly faster. A Pause/Restart/Reset Function has been added, and finally the ability to run in a 16 colour mode if so desired (which makes things a little faster).

I have been very aware over the last month or two that many of my ROM links had become defunct. I'll try hard to find more links over the next week or so, but if you have any favourite ROM archives that I don't have links to, please tell me about them!! In the meantime you might like to try fishing through http://users.skynet.be/sky88423/romlinks.html though many links are now dead. I've added a new link to MSX net on the MSX page, a nice little page with lots of software to download.

Paul Clifford has made a port of the MagicKit assembler to RISC OS and successfully compiled the demo supplied with it. He'll probably wait to release it with his new ARM code PC Engine emulator, as VPCE is far too slow. I also found out Pauls got a little page up with a few screenshots of the new emulator to whet your appetite some more - and believe me it's worth it!!

I've added a link for new PC engine emulator source on the emu programming page. In the meantime there is still no port of the latest version of the Virtual PC Engine Emulator (VPCE), since Paul has stopped development at 0.2 and v0.3 is now available for many other platforms, the original author is looking for someone to do a new RISC OS port. The VPCE page is at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/3340/vpce.html

I've created a new forwarding URL for the Acorn Emulation Message board - http://aemb.home.ml.org I'm considering moving it sometime in the future if I can find a better provider (faster anyway) so update your bookmarks.

A multi-tasking beta version of v2600, Ian Molton's port of the Atari 2600 emulator has been released.

I came across a superb page for 8bit computers, with lots of software, information and emulation details, particularly for the BBC. I've added a link on the links page.

I came across the rather superb Arthur Lives page the otherday with a very humourous review of the Arthur OS as well as some handy tips on how to use it. Perhaps it's not true emulation but I'll add a link on my Arthur emulator section.
http://www.qsure.demon.co.uk/arthur/art.html

Previous update: Thursday 9/4/98 (ZIP file)