Acorn Emulation Latest News

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

39 emulators and counting!

I'm glad to say it's been a busy week in the world of Acorn emulation. David McEwen has been working ridiculous hours to get his latest ports ready for release, and I've been working silly times to try and bring you the latest up-to-date and accurate information.

David McEwen's settled down in his new job and is busy working hard on porting a ridiculous number of emulators in his spare time. Writing this on the morning of the submission deadline: hopefully most of these emulators will have made it on to the CD, if not, they're now available for download from the web.

xNES has been renamed ArcNES, since the code is now very different to the original port. It features new support for mappers 18, 68, 71, 78, 79 and improved support for mappers 23, 8. It has also been vastly sped up.

David has done a port of Marat's MasterGear v1.1. Although Gareth Moore previously ported MasterGear (renaming it Sega) Marat has since developed the emulator further, but Gareth has not had the time to continue, so David is about to release MGear any day now.

A new version of the ColEm source, v1.0 has been released. Marat has further developed his code, and David has ported the latest version featuring ARM code plotting routines for the 256 colour mode, sound support, standardized Z80 and PSG emulation.

The generic port of Stella has been updated and David has yet again kept pace with the latest developments to bring us Stella v1.0 beta, featuring improved timer, graphics and CPU emulation, and mouse support to emulate the paddles.

fMSX has also seen an overhaul in recently, with a much needed speed up, and general improvements all round.

David's new ports of Atari 400/800/5200, Handy (Atari Lynx emulator), Replay+ (a multiple arcade game emulator), ArcDragon, BeebInC and VICE are all in the works, and may well have been released by the time you read this. Why not take a look at the online version of this site for the latest news.

MAME v0.33 final version, and v0.34 beta 1 have both been released (2 days apart). v0.34 beta 1 features NEO GEO emulation, and is the very first NEO GEO emulator on the Acorn, though you're going to need a high spec Acorn to run it.

MESS v0.02 beta 4.1 has been released with lots of new systems supported including, KayPro 2X, PDP-1, Vectrex, Bally Astrocade, Sega Master System/Game Gear. You're reminded that this is a public beta version and therefore not necessarily stable. Thanks to Michael Koenig there is also now a MESS help page with advice on how to use the various Operating Systems you will encounter when using MESS.

I've released a new version of Neditor, the NES ROM image editor, v1.02. Recently Marat Fayzullin amended the iNES header format to cope with VS System ROMs, and since these ROMs are starting to appear (although not actually playable on any Acorn emulator at the moment) it is important that Neditor can cope with them, and it does. There are also a few other small tidy-ups.

Martin Allcorn has sent me a copy of his ARM coded Memotech MTX512 emulator. Although many of you won't have heard of it (I hadn't) the emulator is well written enough, with good compatibility and sound, to warrant a look.

Alain Brobecker, who's been developing a ARM coded 6502 emulator is now working implementing it as an Acorn Atom emulator called Atom Bomb. Although still in the early stages, the Atom was a relatively simple computer and should be quite easy to emulate. This will be the first Atom emulator for RISC OS, the Atom being the only early Acorn system not emulated by the all-conquering 6502Em. Alain is also planning to add an emulator and cross development section to his website.

Icebird, the demo group coding on Acorns, famous for their Hot Gameboy demo and SNEStool utility have completed the follow up demo to HotGB, Dawn. This demo makes HotGB look amateurish, and would have been sure to win the gameboy demo competition this year if it hadn't been cancelled.

I've now added a section to the site concerning Peter Teichman's CP/M emulator, which was missed off the last update.

Player1 and Snupi, Richard Cassidy's frontends for MAME and SNES9X are now careware. Richard asks that if you use them for more than 14 days you donate £5 to the R.S.P.C.A.

Although the multi-tasking version of Z80Em I mentioned last update is in development, a multi-tasking 6502Em is unlikely at the present time due to more complicated hardware being difficult to emulate in the desktop.

Adam Hay has started work on a Commodore 16/Plus 4 emulator to work on low end machines such as his A3010.

Dennis Ranke has released his Xasm cross assembler, a supreb little multi-platform development tool which patches the BASIC Assembler so that you can assembler Chip8, Z80 and 6502 assembly code in the same way as you normally would do ARM code.

This site, and practically all of the Acorn Emulation Archive, as well as various freeware games to play on the emulators will be on the Acorn User cover CD on their November 1998 edition to mark the 200th issue.

Previous update: Sunday 16/8/98 (ZIP file)