Details of previous updates, can be downloaded in a ZIP file - recommended reading.
Happy New Year! Its been several weeks since the last update, as I had to reformat my hard drive and lost internet connection for a while, but the emulation page is back.
The latest edition (January 1998) of Acorn User is now out, and emulation gets a few mentions. The first is on the news page (page 6) where they report that in the Acorn Times, you will soon be able to run the, "world's leading 16-bit games", on your Acorn, referring to the megadrive emulator. The Acorn Emulation page (this site) also gets its first mention in print in the games show (page 56) with a 1/2 page review. It made me feel all nice and warm inside to see it in print :o)
The latest edition of Archimedes World has a small review (1/3 of a page) of Purple Monichi's Gameboy emulator, in its PD section (page 60). There is nothing new to report, except there is a rather nice screenshot of Donkey Kong Land's title screen with the article.
One of the comments from Steve Mumford in his Acorn User review was that the "overall format of the pages" could be improved. To this end I am hoping to revamp these pages sometime in mid-January, and improve the layout and details.
IMPORTANT: I am also considering altering the location of these pages from geocities to arcsites, as they are specifically dedicated to the Acorn, won't have such long a URL, may be able to give me more space, won't have irritating adverts popping up all the time, on the downside, they may be a little slower to access. To prevent you losing the Acorn Emulation page (AEP), you should bookmark it as http://www.come.to/emulate as this is a short forwarding address which will be altered to always point to the current location of the AEP.
Sam Ellis (author of STem) tells me, that having written the massive jump table into the code, it now runs 25% faster! The next version should be well worth waiting for, and should be out sometime towards the end of January.
It seems that there is a problem with compatibility of the Arthur emulator with either RISC OS 3.7 or StrongARM, though I don't know which, and would be very interested to know! I've also discovered the email address of the Wombat who created the Arthur emulator.
Thanks to Steve Robb, who sent me some great screenshots for Frodo, finally one from version 4.1 rather than the old 4.0 I'd been using. He also sent a palette file, to allow the screen colours to be adjusted to match the original C64 colours in 16 colour modes. There's also now a recommended software list for the C64, again suggested by Steve.
Added a link to the Blue Ribbon Free Speech on the Web campaign - something I feel is very important, in light of the fact that otherwise large corporations could seriously damage the development of legitimate emulators, because of the risk of piracy. I've also added a nice little animated MAME banner that I found elsewhere on the web. Added Richard Cassidy (MAME Player1 frontend) to the email address list. I've altered the Sega icon on the SMS/GG page, so it's more inline with text (boring!), and added a screenshot of Mortal Kombat (BTW, gore code for MK1 is 2,1,2,down,up). Added some information, corrected typos, and added screenshots of multi-tasking, Micro Machines, Tetris and Tennis to the Gameboy emulation page. I've also added a new page to the site, the gallery, it's a collection of most of the screenshots on this site, all on one page, for your enjoyment. I've added a new screenshot, for Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, on the PC. I thought I'd also add a couple of nice quotes to the index page, just to boost my ego you understand :o) Added a new Gameboy ROM page, and 2 great links and a bit of detail about gameboy game genie cheat codes. I've added a freeware BBC emulator to the wanted page, as it really isn't good enough that there are no freeware emulators for the StrongARM that work well.
Gareth Long is looking for some more IO (Input/Output) interface options to put into ARM MAME if anyone has any information that can lead to him to be able to support more input devices, please email him. Version 0.09 of Richard Cassidy's Player1 front end for ARM MAME has just been released, and moved to a new page. It has been largely rewritten and includes: improved MAME install, improved ROM dir handling, adjusted ROM install and handling to cope with CFG and HI dirs, added initialise for old ROM dirs, added 'install' mame option, improved editing window interaction, and numerous other minor features and bug fixes. I thought I'd probably better mention the email address for sending email to Gareth Long's emulation mailing list.
Michael Koenig has been helping me out by testing some emulators on his PC card, particularly BBC emulators. See the BBC page for more details. Added a technical link to the source code of a portable BBC emulator. Phillip Banks informs me of the compatibility problem with 65Host on a StrongARM, but apparently it is fixable, see the BBC page for details. I've added a link to Alex Card's massive compatibility list of BBC Games with 6502Em.
Dave Gilbert, author of ArcEm has furnished me with a nice screenshot of ArcEm running on a DEC Alpha, not too pretty though, as for legal reasons it is only running ARM Linux.
Previous update: Sunday 14/12/97 (ZIP file)