Acorn Emulation Latest News

Details of all previous updates, can be viewed online - recommended reading.

Just when you thought the Acorn Emulation Page was dead, the gaming sites were starting to report emulation news, and you were sure Dave had left to play on his new PC, you're wrong! Sorry its been such a while since the last update, I'm afraid I've been a little busy away at university soaking up the atmosphere (beer) and haven't had a lot of time to maintain the site. I do keep up with what's happening in the Acorn emulation scene and will be updating the site during my holidays if not during term.

I've had many many people fill in the competition form with details of their emulating exploits but as yet, only 2 actual game reviews have been received. If you've submitted the form, but haven't sent off your game review please do so in the near future. The deadline for entries was to be November 30th, but due to the fact I didn't have time to look at them till a long while after that, I'm moving it back to 20th March. If you haven't filled the form in yet, what are you waiting for? I'm looking for a lot more in the way of forms being filled in, come on, it only takes a second. In the mean time, here is a table of the results I've recieved upto 21/12/98

Generator, a dynamic recompiling Megadrive emulator has been ported to the Acorn by David McEwen. Originally written by James Ponder (yep, the one from doggysoft) much work has been done to speed the emulator up and improve its compatibility, the emulator hasn't officially been released yet and is being delayed while some bugs are cleared up. You can take a look at the original Generator home page with source code though.

In the abscence of a release of Gareth Long's ARM coded megadrive emulator, he's been working on adding a, "'lite' version of the renderer", from it to the megadrive driver that features in MESS which means that the megadrive emulation is already a lot faster.As well as this improved Megadrive driver, the next version of MESS also has new systems added in the form of emulation of a basic PC (from the early 80s), and Atari 7800 and Spectrum emulation. Look forward to the next release of MESS.

The IDSA continue to rock the retrogaming world with the persistant destruction of various ROM archives including Daves Classics among others. I can't wait to see what they do in the face of the forthcoming playstation emulators for the PC and Mac (not RISC OS I'm afraid). The only advice I can give is to download, download, download, in case the ROM sites you may want to use in future are forced to close. I specifically do NOT recommend the use of pirated software.

After I asked Michael Koenig to send me a list of his links concerning dynamic recompiling emulators, he knocked up a web page which I've now put on the site as a reference for anyone interested in this field of emulation.

A new version of Archie, Chris Lloyd's Acorn emulator for PCs has been released, which now has much improved hardware emulation, and even has the start of running the RISC OS ROMs. You can now play Lander on a PC!! This site has copies of the RISC OS ROMs needed for this emulator, though you absolutely MUST NOT download them unless you've got RISC OS 3.11 already on your Acorn.

I've recently done an interview with Sam Ellis, author of STem. A while ago, Alain Brobecker suggested I do a kind of self-interview for the site describing how it all came to be, we never quite finished, but it's now online.

After a visit to the States, Gareth Long returned home (alebit for a short time) and while here managed to get a port of the latest version of Snes9X, v1.15 beta 1.0 released on 19/12/98. The big news for this release is that Snes9X is now capable of playing the legendary Super Mario Kart almost perfectly.

With the decline of the Phoenix project, it appears as though the RISC OS world has been diagnosed a fatal disease over the coming years. One of the few hopes for maintaining the wonderful Operating System we all cherish is through emulation both in software and hardware. Software emulators are improving fairly regularly though there is no really competent emulator available at the moment. However, the ChiBER board which is being developed as a slot in card for PCs with an ARM chip and various other pieces of Acorn-orientated hardware is currently one of the biggest hopes.

After much pestering of Marat Fayzullin, David McEwen's finally got hold of the latest source code to VGB which has just been released for the PC. This latest version of the Virtual GameBoy supports the newly released Colour Gameboy games, and is the first emulator on the Acorn to do this. Jerome Mathevet has updated his !Gameboy compatibility list adding several more games and updating it for the latest version.

A fair while back Andreas Stroiczek released the source to the last version 0.59 of his ARM coded !Gameboy emulator, Psion 5 port anyone?

You may have noticed by now that I've changed the navigation of the site a little, subdividing systems into Computer, Console, Arcade and Other because of the difficulty of parsing the list otherwise, I hope this improves things. What do you think? I've also re-established the link to the legalise 8 bit ROMs campaign.

In the abscence of updates from this site, and as an expansion to his aging section on emulation, Gareth Moore has completely revamped the emulation section on 32bit Acorn Gaming to give a summary of most of the emulators available. It's a good alternative location to get the latest news.

The java emulation page has been updated with 2 new java emulators, Hob, a spectrum emulator, and JavaInvaders an 8088 arcade game emulator.

Marco Baye has developed ACME, a multi-platform corss-assembler for the 65xx series of processors, including the 65816 as used in the SNES.

Progress has been made on Alain Brobecker's AtomBOMB emulator of the Acorn Atom (as yet unreleased) since it now displays the 'Acorn Atom' logo and the prompt, but there's a long way to go yet.

Acorn Gaming 98 has awarded the prize of best emulator author to David McEwen, and best emulator to Gareth Long's Snes9X. There are so many different qualities in the emulators being produced at the moment that it makes it almost impossible for me to pick 'the best', what with technical difficulty, number of emulators produced, performance of emulators, and entertainment value of these emulators, all making it very difficult indeed. The emulation world has come a long way on the Acorn in the past year, this time last year we'd just had David McEwen's first port of ColEm, were still looking forward to the release of the ARM coded SMS emu (Miracle), and Spec128, and I'd just released the first version of my babe emulator.

The copyright notice at the bottom of each page should really be updated with 1999 on the end, but I'm afraid I have little inclination to do this right now what with going back to university tomorrow morning: just take it as read.

Sam Ellis has released v2.00 of STem his Atari ST emulator, which now has the notorious mouse bug fixed. Although the emulator is not that much faster than previously, it is a lot more usable.

David McEwen has released various new versions of AdamEm, latest being v0.20 2/11/98 also Stella, the full version 1.00 13/12/98 and a new release of ColEm and Atari 7800 since October. He's also managed to get a new version of MGear out as well as porting the TI8x emulator. Sorry I've been so late with these, but it's a nightmare trying to keep up with him.

Since I've not had chance to get round to trying to port madNES, David McEwen has taken over the reins and has ported Roberto Rosarios NES emulator to the Acorn. In light of this, it looks like David will stop development of his ArcNES NES emulator, which is a developed version of xNES. David's also working on getting a copy of ComeBack 64 released, a C64 emulator.

A big thankyou must got o David for hassling me to finally get this site updated once more and for sending me some ready to upload information about his latest releases, without which the site wouldn't have been updated for even longer.

Michael Foot has released the first version of his freeware BeebIt emulator of the BBC B, first reported on this site back at the start of October.

I've added an old news page for back editions of this news page rather than the normal zip archive which has now been removed. For too long now the RISC OS 2 emulator on the Acorn emulation archive was stored in a corrupted Zip file, this has now been remedied.

Recently Gareth Long and his wife were involved in a serious car crash whilst in the U.S. and although recovering, his wife suffered quite serious injuries. I would like to wish her and Gareth the very best and hope they are both well soon.

Previous update: Thursday 1/10/98