Details of previous updates, can be downloaded in a ZIP file - recommended reading.
A pre-pre-pre-release version of the new sega master system emulator has been sent out to a select few people for evaluation and testing. I'm very happy to say that it lives up to all expectations - this emulator is brilliant! DO NOT ask the authors or myself for a copy for testing at the moment, as we will not reply.
David Mcewen, who only the other week ported Marat Fayzullin's ColecoVision emulator, has now also ported Marat's MSX emulator, fMSX. David is looking into porting more emulators, and interstingly, a port of xNES. Colecovision has recently been updated, and should now have a few problems fixed, and improved desktop frontend.
I've released v0.02 of my Babe emulator, of the world's first stored program computer, the Manchester Mark 1 or Baby back in 1948. The program contains the emulator and assembler for the computer. Manchester University are also running a programming competition, that you may like to enter. There is no Babe page at this Acorn emulation site, instead the Babe page is at my home site. I will be releasing further improved versions over the next few days.
MAME 0.30.1 was released on 2/2/98 and has a couple of bug fixes, and the cheat mode ability now working correctly.
STem v1.01, the Atari ST emulator by Sam Ellis has just been released, and the new version is no 25% faster than v1.00. Still very much in beta test, Sam is now developing it again since he is back after the christmas holidays. Apparently Blitter emulation is now complete, and should be in version 1.02 when it is released.
I've added the BlankAid module, which comes in very handy with a lot of emulators, by preventing the screensaver from starting midway through program use. This is caused by the emulator not allowing the screensaver to register keypresses, so the screensaver thinks nothing has been pressed and activates, BlankAid remedies this.
Seeing as the AppleIIe emulator Virtu cannot load .NIB images, and is no longer in development. Thanks to Michael Koenig has converted a PC C++ program to ANSI C, and compiled it on the Acorn, a NIB to DSK convertor is now available.
Michael Koenig has yet again come through with the goods for the foreign emulator page, with new comments on several emulators. We've also discovered, that the psion emulator is the only one which actually runs on the PC Software emulator, and it is unlikely that any others will, so I have removed the column from the foreign emulator page.
I have created a new emulator authoring page, which brings together links to many emulator resources. I've tried to collect as many manuals, hints, FAQs and source codes from various emulators as possible on one page. Most are moved here from the links page but I've also added a lot more. I aim to improve this page a lot, in order to help new authors (like myself :o) with writing an emulator, if anyone has any docs to contribute, or links that they know of, I'd be very glad to hear from them.
I've created a little banner for the Acorn Emulation Page,
so if you link to the AEP in future, if you could use this banner I'd really
appreciate it - after all, it's just over 5Kb in size, so is pretty small.
If any artists out there would like to create an alternative banner, I'd
be very interested to see it!
Having had a play, I managed to get the developing Spectrum 128 emulator going on a RISC PC 600, playing the demo version of Doom! The emulator is pretty fast and works well considering the early stage of development that it's at. There is still a lot of optimisation to go into the emulator but it looks very promising.
I am in serious need of links to Gameboy ROM image pages, as 3 of my 4 are down semi-permanently. If you can help, send me an email - since this is legally a grey area, all emails concerning this are strictly confidential.
I've added no end of links from Dave's Arcade Classics for several different systems, since he has a lot of ROM images online. New screenshots from the Acorn version of the Unix Amiga Emulator (UAE), and ARM mame, kindly done for me by Matt Nichols. Also from the new SMS emulator, running on an A5000 and RISC PC.
Previous update: Sunday 25/1/98 (ZIP file)