Acorn Emulation Latest

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

32 emulators and counting!

Final A Level revision is well and truly underway, so there won't be much in the way of progress/news until after June 16th I'm afraid. Hopefully then I'll find some time to put some serious work into the site.

There is a new Acorn emulator for Windows 95, AcornEmu is again pretty simple and not quite up to the quality of Archie, but again looks promising.

Gareth Long, famous for his ports of MAME, MESS and SNES9x (eventually) has now joined the retrocade team in order to port Retrocade to the Acorn. Retrocade is another arcade emulator like MAME, but which is still in development but apparently supports many different classic arcade games. Retrocade is smaller and more modular than MAME since it was designed with a massive number of games in mind. Retrocade also has a smaller team working on it, which although means less games, means better design and coding, it is also to be more platform specific with a lot more ARM code in than MAME (which has very little). Basically this goes for a faster, smaller emulator, probably mainly of the classic games rather than the Capcom super titles, but apparently it should even work acceptably on older machines (such as my A5000).

Following on from last time's Wonderboy III review, this time round the newly reviewed game of the update is Final Fight, the classic beat 'em up.

Gareth Moore's gaming page, and therefore his emulation pages have moved to a new domain at http://www.acorn-gaming.org.uk, all links have been updated. I've also heard a little rumour that Acorn Arcade might be getting their own emulation section to try and popularise that good games can be played under emulation on an Acorn. I've been trying to get this message across to many (who don't read this page) for months now, hopefully this'll help the cause.

New Sega Master System recommended ROMs have been added, taken from Sega Emulation World's best games list in their FAQ section. Gareth Williams tells me that my java chat room works fine with Browse and Java. I've added a link to a page with masses of Gameboy ROMs, though they're held on geocities and fortune cities servers so could go down any day now. I've added 7 more megadrive ROM site links, since I realised most of mine were broken - they'll come in handy when MESS is released. I've added a section to my beginners guide to emulation about the different methods of emulation, and a simple overview of how it works. I'm afraid the beginners guide does need a good overhaul, but it won't get it for the moment since I'm not even sure anyone's found it interesting?

I'm trying to add some brief technical information about each emulated system, mainly comprising simple details about the CPU, clock speed, display size, number of colours and sprites, number of sound channels, amount of RAM and VRAM, and maximum ROM size. So far I've done this for the Master System, Gameboy and NES, and hope to do it for the other systems in future, if you have any information to contribute, please tell me. Emulator authors, I'm talking to you!

I've performed an interview with Paul Clifford concerning his work on emulation on the Acorn. Hopefully this'll be the first of a series of interviews (authors permitting) to provide some insight into the work that goes on behind the scenes to allow you to play all these superb games. In future, all interviews will be indexed from the email address book page (unless I get a sufficient number to setup a separate section).

Paul Clifford's PC Engine emulator should be released fairly soon. There are still a few problems with some games not working, but Paul will be hopefully doing a fairly hefty rewrite of some sections to try and fix those problems after the initial release.

Joe Kelleher has set up a new web page for his forthcoming Spectrum 128 emulator with news of its progress and future developments, my page on the emulator has been updated accordingly.

A Chip8 emulator by Eli-Jean Leyssens has been released by TopicWEB. It emulates a very simple virtual machine, but plays a mean game of pong!

MAME v0.33 beta 3(.1) should be out fairly soon now Gareth's had a chance to get it working so we can look forward to a few more games, ZIP file support, and catching up with out PC cousins. Apparently it now supports over 500 games!

MESS has entered release candidate stage, and with a bit of luck should be released around the end of May. Apparently the Colour Genie and TRS-80 computers have been added to the system, and another "more familiar" machine will hopefully also be added - should be good!

The MAME and MESS teams are apparently looking into dynamic recompilation (different to the almost ubiquitous interpretive emulation) as an alternative to separate machine code cores. This would hopefully allow very fast (faster than ARM code interpretive emulation) and still the holy grail of platform independent code that has been the cause of the slow down of MAME in the past.

The June 1998 edition of Acorn User is now out, and emulation gets a small mention in the public domain section on page 14 which cites my Acorn Emulation Archive as, "...an excellent example..", of a specialist archive. The May issue of Archimedes World is also out (I'm a bit late on this one I'm afraid) and mentions emulation in the DarcWorld section on page 20, concerning the ability to play the 8bit NES version of Elite.

I'm very grateful to max for sending me a copy of the RISC OS 2 emulator which he had lying around. This program basically removes RISC OS 3 and loads the RISC OS 2 modules into memory until the next reset, allowing you to get all nostalgic about just how bad RISC OS 2 really was. The author (person who put this together) is unknown, so I'd be very grateful to anyone who could put me in contact with him (he can remain anonymous if he wishes, I'd just like to speak to him).

SNEStool, v0.09 by the Icebird group, a SNES ROM image editor for the Acorn, has been released. SNEStool allows detection of ROM image format, and conversion between SMC/SWC, FIG, MGH, GD and RAW formats. It also allows splitting and recombining of ROM images to allow them to fit on several disks. These features have been available on the PC for a while, but with this release can now be done on an Acorn. I think it's safe to say we can expect to see more emulation developments from this talented group!

The Hot Gameboy demo ROM by Icebird has also been released, an example of demo coding on the gameboy written at the Symposium'98 demo competition. I wouldn't normally include ROMs (even freeware ones) on this site, but since it is by a group who also develop for the Acorn, I thought I'd put it up.

The RISC OS 2 emulator, and Chip8 emulator have been uploaded to the Acorn Emulation Archive.

I've also recently signed up to ICQ (on my PC), my id number is 12391667. If you have ICQ, you can contact me while I'm online if there's anything particular you want to know (about emulation). I'm hoping that in this way, I may get more feedback from people who read this page.

Michael Koenig suggested 2 new good features of an emulator that I've added to the section on the programming page.

To Peter Teichman: All email I've tried to send you has unfortunately bounced, but if you could send me that preview of the CP/M emulator that you mentioned then I'd be very grateful!

Previous update: Monday 11/5/98 (ZIP file)