Acorn Emulation Latest

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

35 emulators and counting! 

The Acorn Emulation Page is back after a month, with a new look - I hope you like the new style. The main reason for the delay was that I needed to restructure the site (maintenance was getting painful) into separate directories, the last time it was restructured was when it became multi-page!!! It's likely there's a lot of holes in this HTML it's largely untested, and I've got to be a bit brief because I leave for the South of France at 5am tomorrow (for 2 weeks) and I haven't packed yet :o) Sorry for the long delay folks, but it's been worth the wait.............

Forget waiting for the Acorn gaming world to get its act together, it'll never ever be this good : SNES9X
Oh, except perhaps for the sound, but Gatch is on to it so you can guarantee that it's not much of an issue!

Late breaking news: SNES9x 1.05 test 3 has just been released. Sound has been improved a lot more, but still isn't the promised 16 bit sound which will follow soon. Saving and loading of snapshots is now supported, as is battery backed RAM support, improved loading, key support and GZip decompression (for loading comrpessed ROMs).

MAME 0.33 beta 7 has been released, now with 628 games supported. The next release should be the full 0.33 since there is now a freeze on adding new drivers while this version is finalised.

SNUPI and MESSplay, two nice little frontends to allow you to fiddle with your favourite emulators in comfort have been released.

Filelower has been released which can convert all MAME roms to lower case as is required by the emulator.

A C++ version of Virtu, the Apple][e emulator is in the works and hopefully we can persuade Digital Jellyfish to do another Acorn version.

Two new versions of ArcEm, the kick-ass Archimedes Emulator for Unix have been released taking it to v0.30 with significant speed ups, bug fixes and improvements in compatibility.

MESS drivers, for the next version, Apple][, Atari 800 and 5200, Sega Master System/Game Gear, Bally Astrocade and Gameboy, PDP-1 and Kay 2x.

A NEO GEO driver is being written for MAME, to allow access to a vast collection of arcade games. The NEO GEO was both an arcade machine and (expensive) home console, it appears likely that MAME will emulate the arcade side, while MESS will cope with the console section. The games and hardware are nearly identical I believe. NEO GEO emulation is fairly new on any platform, with the first ever NEO GEO emulator only being released a couple of months ago.

BreadBox64, Denys Bogatz ARM coded C64 emulator has been released in full (not the crippled demo we've had for ages).

Retrocade is getting nearer and nearer to release who knows, maybe August?

A Chip 8 front end has been developed by Dennis Ranke, we're just waiting for Eli-Jean to give it the ok and then it'll be released.

Dennis Ranke has also developed a superb cross compiler for Z80, Chip8 and 6502 with 65C816 to be added sometime soon hopefully. It patches the BASIC assembler much as ExtAsm does and allows you to assemble for all these platforms by setting the OPT number differently. This is being polished off before release.

Having gotten permission to reproduce emulation articles in Archimedes World, from the editor, Mark Webb (to whom I'm very grateful), I've typed up a very good article with a small introduction to emulation, and a large section on the copyright debate, by Matthew Bloch. I've also got permission from Computer Shopper (who used to carry Arch articles) and have typed up a review of Acorn's software emulator.

The Purple Monchichi has passed the source code to his gameboy emulator onto a third party who is planning to continue developing it, to add 2 player facilities over a LAN or the Internet, also better multi-tasking than Paul Clifford's hack, improved sound emulation and lots more - watch this space!

Oh, and there's an interview with Denys Bogatz, author of Breadbox64.

Previous update: Monday 22/6/98 (ZIP file)