Acorn Emulation Latest

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

34 emulators and counting! 

I've finally completed 13 years of school education having taken my last A level module on the 16th. I'm now looking forward to one hell of a lot of sleep, holidays, football, and of course emulation. I don't start again until October, so I'm thinking of revamping this site a little, any suggestions of things you'd like to see, articles you've written yourself (why not take a couple of hours to review an emulator), or interviews you'd like to read, email me. Since the last update I've upgraded from Netscape 3 Gold with editor to Netscape Communicator Professional using Composer as the WYSIWYG HTML editor. I think I've got everything set up ok, but please do tell me if you experience any broken links so that I can remedy them. The good news is that I've now got a spell checker so hopefully you'll notice fewer typos from now on.

Acorn emulation seems to be getting even more recognition of late with the latest version of ARM MAME being announced on the EMU news service.

MAME 0.33 beta 6.1 has been released, and now supports 604 games. R.R.Chasmer has released v1.10 of his MAME play front end for MAME, he has also released File Lower, a utility to rename the ROM images to lower case as required by MAME and MESS.

The Genesis driver in MESS has already undergone several bug fixes towards the next version to try and aid some of the games which don't work in v0.1. Gareth has also made the system ROMs needed to emulate several of the systems, and a few of those rare colorgenie disks available to download from his site. Gareth has reported that for the next version an Atari 800 emulator will be present, as well as one of 2 submitted vectrex emulations. I've added a page concerning the Colour Genie, supplying some information about it and software for it. R.R.Chasmer has released the first MESS front end, MESS play to aid use of the command line driven emulator.

xNES v0.30 has been released, it is now noticably faster, has the option to set the frameskip, can select the mirroring to use, improved mappers 1 and 4, one screen mirroring works, and has the option to override the ROM image's specified mapper number, since in many cases it can be wrong. Oh, and I've updated the NES page quite a bit (it had been very neglected). Some of you may have had problems with xNES in the past, as I did myself, but this new version even works fine on my A5000. Admittedly with a frameskip of 10 and a ridiculously low Iperiod, it's still not playable, but it does work! :o) The best news is that Super Mario Brothers 3 is now playable! Some games still have scrolling problems, but David is hoping to implement a scanline method of screen draw to fix them for an up and coming version.

I've written an iNES format header editor for NES ROMs called Neditor. It allows you to alter all the settings stored in the ROM image header concerning the games hardware requirements, such as mapper numbers, as well as automatically cleaning out 'dirty' headers which can cause problems with some emulators - if you use xNES, you'll use this!

Retrocade should hopefully be out sometime early in July, possibly the 4th or maybe the 12th (the project's birthday) announced by a member of the development team, with a bit of luck the Acorn version will soon follow. For those of you who don't know, retrocade is an arcade emulator in a similar realm to MAME, except is not such an open project, and has an emphasis on ease of use and performance (speed). Gareth Long is doing the Acorn port.

I've added some technical information for the Atari 2600, Amiga, Apple][e, Oric, TRS-80, and the ColecoAdam as well as corrected several others, with much help from Michael Koenig. Cheers MIKe!

Just a couple of days ago, on June 21st was the 50th anniversary of the world's first stored program computer, the Baby, and you might like to join in the celebrations by taking a look at my Babe emulator of it.

One of the most powerful handheld consoles ever released was the Atari Lynx. It was based on a relatively simple 65C02 CPU, but had several 16 bit support chips to give it graphics of a similar quality to the megadrive or PC Engine, which gamegear and gameboy owners could only weep at. The games were great too, with titles such as Hard Drivin' and California Games (pictured here). The best news (and the reason that this is mentioned on this site) is that Kevin Wilkins released the C++ source code to his Handy emulator of the Lynx, which is freely available to port to any system. So if you know C++ you might fancy having a go at porting Handy to the Acorn!?

Or maybe you'd like to try something a little less adventurous for your first emulation project - Julian Pickering emailed me about an Atari 8 bit emulator that he'd found. It emulates the Atari 800, 800XL, 130XE and 5200, none of which are emulated on the Acorn yet. The emulator is also written in 100% C and has already been ported to several major platforms. Anyone want to take this under their belt? Take a look!

Added a link to Michael Koenig's page of emulation links. Also added several more software links, notably ROMLINE for megadrive and master land for SMS. I've added a link to a page containing hacked NES ROMs - there's even a version of mario sonic called Somari. It really is an amazing technical achievement that this version has many of the features that the megadrive Sonic 1 had, but the yet the technically, more powerful than the NES, master system missed, such as collectable rings when you hit a monster, loop the loops and escaping animals when you free them - a great little game. The Top 25 emulation sites updated weekly is another must visit link!

SNES9x has now been released for most other major platforms with the source code due to be released fairly soon also. Gareth Long will hopefully be looking at the Acorn port pretty soon. I've checked out the DOS version which has a pretty good level of compatibility with preliminary SuperFX chip support (pretty new for SNES emulators on any platform) and good sound quality and speed. Quite how well this will convert to the Acorn remains to be seen.

Alain Brobecker has written and released a new freeware 6502 emulator in ARM code. At the moment the emulator is unfinished (with several opcodes unsupported) and doesn't actually emulate any specific system. However it comes with a very handy assembler and debugger and is still under development. This is very similar to my own 6502 emulator project (still underway) so Alain and I are looking into working together to see what we can come up with - watch this space!

Following the interviews with Gareth Long and Paul Clifford, the interview for this update is with David McEwen, with news of what he's planning to port for the future, including a very exciting Sega emulator!! Just a reminder, the interviews are indexed from the email address book.

I've added an emulation articles section to the site. This contains reviews, and features that have appeared in magazines, concerning Acorn emulation. Many of them make very interesting reading, and I am on the look out for more such articles if people find any? I'm very grateful to Steve Turnbull, the Acorn User editor, for giving me permission to reproduce these articles.

Emulation gets a mention in the latest July 1998 edition of Acorn User on the public domain page 13. There is a short article about Richard Talbot-Watkins Miracle being released, and a nice little quote about this site from Paul Wheatley which you can see on the main homepage.

This update there are 2 recommended games; Rock 'N' Roll racing for the Megadrive, and Worms for the Megadrive and Gameboy. Previous recommended games have been Wonderboy III and Final Fight. The reviewed recommended games are now indexed on the top games page. Richard Harker sent in a list of some of his favourite emulated games.

I've set up another communications aid in the form of an ICQ message form so that you can send messages to me instantly when I'm online, whether you have ICQ or not (it's not available on the Acorn). This form is accessible from the chat room page. Thanks to Ian Scott for telling me about a couple of broken ROM links and the new URLs for the Sega Master System.

The Acorn Emulation Archive has been updated with; Neditor, MAME play, MESS play, File Lower and xNES v0.30.

Previous update: Saturday 6/6/98 (ZIP file)