This article is copied from the Game Show section, page 56 of the January 1998 edition of Acorn User. Reproduced with kind permission. The text on this page is copyright 1997 IDG Media Ltd.
If you've enjoyed using the emulators included on the latest Acorn User CD-ROM, this month's featured page might interest you.
The fine art of emulation
David Sharp's Acorn Emulation Web page has undergone a series of updates recently in this quest to make it the best general emulation page available for Acorn computers. His aims are to promote interest in the Acorn emulation scene, thereby ensuring that new products continue to be developed and released.
There are more emulators available for the Acorn than one might guess and David's page does a good job of collecting all the appropriate links together. However, more than just a collection of URLs, David has tried to track down the authors concerned and speak with them about their projects. In a couple of cases this has led to some exciting announcements, such as the forthcoming Sega Megadrive and all-new PC Engine emulators.
Other information available includes a beginner's guide to the world of emulation, and an impressive set of links to technical documentation on topics ranging from emulator sourcecode to the hardware specifications of the Nintendo 64. Every machine that can be emulated on the Acorn has its own page witha brief description of the various packages available, both commercial and freeware, along with pointers to an relevant websites.
There's a lot of fascinating material referenced from this site, and in some places the volume of text one has to wade through can become a little distracting. The content is impressive, but I hope David can spare some time to work on the overall format of the pages - careful layout could speed navigation through the site and make the text easier to absorb.
The page itself is available at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/2822 and whether you're looking for hard technical info or just the links to the latest crop of Acorn emulators, I humbly suggest you take a look.
Skating past some of the hairy legal issues that crop with console emulation, I still think that the careful study of the games of yesteryear can provide a lot of information to the budding programmer - for instance, I'd dearly love to see someone produce an enhanced and upgrades Acorn version of a Spectrum game name Deactivators, a 3D puzzle game vaguely reminiscent of Tower of Babel to which I recently found myself uncontrollably addicted.