IBM PC

The IBM PC compatible has become almost ubiquitous in recent years, but just those few years ago, the Acorn was technologically streets ahead and could even challenge a PC at its own game via emulation. Still, those days are gone, and we live on in the futility of hoping that the next version of Windows will have less bugs than the last....

PCem

The IBM compatible computer has been emulated by the software Acorn PC Emulator now for several years, reaching version 1.86 which was capable of displaying VGA graphics emulating an 8086 processor.

Older software ie. pre windows will work almost fine on these software emulators, for example I have played Centurion (see the screenshot) and Leisure Suit Larry to destruction (alebit slowly), even Dune II, on my A5000, using the Acorn PCEm. Anything more recent (the last 3-4 years) is practically unusable, although I did manage to get a version of Windows 3.0 running on my A5000, not quickly enough to be comfortable but it did run. More importantly, in days of old, than running games, the Acorn emulator, could run decent business software, for example Word Perfect 5 and Lotus 123, the orignal DOS versions both ran at a usable speed!

Quite interestingly, the Acorn software emulator can even run some emulators for the PC, see the foreign emulators page for more details.

FasterPC

David Lawrence's software PC emulator couldn't handle VGA graphics, and was far less versatile than Acorn's emulator, but it was faster with the EGA graphics that it could manage and could play very old (and I mean very old) PC games significantly faster than PCem. It never really caught on much since it was released near the end of the era when software based PC emulators were capable of handling PC software that was still in use, let alone new releases.

Hardware emulation

For any practical emulation you need a PC card of some kind, costing under £500 for some quite reasonable specs. My advice is to shop around, as each user has there own individual needs. The 2 main suppliers of PC cards are:
CJE Micros
CJE Micros temporary uptodate website
Aleph One

One important point to note, that is often overlooked, is that the user is often better off buying an older or 2nd hand PC system, than purchasing a PC card, which could well cost about the same, if not more.

Unfortunately there are no shareware or freeware PC emulators and, because of the difficulty of development, we are unlikely to see any. I aught to mention, that version 1.82 when tested on a RISC PC, failed to work in multi-tasking mode (ie. in a window), but seems to be fine if put in single-tasking.

Relevent Pages:
ArmEdit - freeware utilities by Alexander Thoukdides for use with the PC card
WinRISC - a program to allow Windows programs to run (slowly) in RISC OS, with a PC card
Acorn PC Card software FTP
32bit Acorn Gaming: Games on x86 cards
Acorn RISC PC: PC card information