Paul Clifford is pretty well known in the Acorn emulation world for his work on the WIMP frontend for the gameboy emulator, his port of the Virtual PC Engine Emulator (VPCE) and now his own forthcoming ARM coded PC Engine emulator to be released soon. He has also ported the only 2 homebrew development kits I've heard of on the Acorn, for the Gameboy and PC Engine.
When did you first get interested in emulation?
Shortly after I played Tetris on Purple Monchichi's Gameboy emulator for the first time. My real Gameboy was losing loads of lines on the left hand side of the screen and I needed a cheap replacement :)
What gave you the idea to give Purple Monchichi's Gameboy emulator a WIMP frontend?
After I got my StrongARM I had to fiddle with the Gameboy frontend to get it working again, and since the code was on my screen I decided to make a few changes and improvements so I could save my game position and, er, cheat. That's probably as far as I would have bothered taking it, but a little later I got an email from Ting Zwei Kuei who'd managed to get version 0.47 running in a window. It ran at the wrong speed on my machine, but I was very impressed and decided to have a go with the newly released version 0.56, and this developed into the currently available frontend.
Any idea who the mysterious Purple Monchichi really is? (have you ever had any contact with him?)
I believe he lives in Germany, but beyond that I've no idea!
What prompted you to port Virtual PC Engine?
I bought a real PC Engine towards the end of its lifetime and there were a number of titles I never managed to get my hands on, such as the Bomberman series. When I saw that Jens Restemeier was asking for people to port his PC Engine emulator it seemed like the perfect solution and I jumped at the chance.
How come you started work on your own PC Engine emulator, and when?
The Virtual PC Engine was written to be portable, and I was a little disappointed with the frame rates it achieved under RISC OS so I began to rewrite parts of it in ARM code. After a while there was more ARM than C code and I decided to make a clean break and start my own version.
What sort of performance - compatibility and speed, have you been getting from the emulator?
The frame rate can vary quite a lot between games, but the current version very rarely drops below full speed. I've added sound emulation, which adds a lot to the atmosphere, and the majority of games seem to work but there are a few that stubbornly refuse to do anything, unfortunately.
When can we expect the first release?
I have a number of working versions, one of which I probably ought to release soon, but I've been holding back trying to sort out a number of annoying little problems first. The main trouble area is the video emulation, which has been responsible for a number of headaches over the past few months. I've had a number of people asking about the release so I expect I'll put one of the earlier (working) versions on my webpage sometime over the weekend. I'm also aiming to make the source code available, but it'll probably appear a few days after the main release so as to give me time to tidy it up.
Do you use any other emulators?
I had a quick play with Golden Axe on the System 16 emulator for the PC a while back and tried Final Fight on the current MAME beta when it was released, but other than that I've not actually used any emulators recently - GoldenEye and FF7 make other games look rather shallow ;)
Any favourite PC Engine or Gameboy games?
On the Gameboy, definitely Tetris, and on the PC Engine it would have to be a draw between PC Kid 2 and Bomberman '94.
What other consoles and computers do you own?
Umm, far too many!
Are you planning to develop or help out with any other emulators for the Acorn in future?
Not at the moment. I need to earn some money over the holiday, so I'll be doing other things for a while.
What happened to the Gameboy emulator you were going to develop from scratch?
I shelved it to work on the PC Engine emulator. I may come back to it at a later date as there are a number of things I'd like to see added to Purple Monchichi's emulator, but I can't promise anything soon.
Have you ever thought of working on any other emulators?
I toyed with the idea of writing a SNES emulator for a while, but that never got further than me collecting a few technical documents.
Have you had much support from the emulator users having worked on 3 emulators for the system?
Yep, people have been very nice. The only wierd comments I've had were from DOS/Windows users looking for roms or wondering why the emulators on my web page dont run under Windows 95. One person even expected me to translate a Japanese PC Engine game into English for him :)
You've ported the Gameboy and PC Engine development kits, have you ever created anything with them?
I have to admit that I only ported them so as to have a means of testing certain parts of my emulators, and I've never actually tried writing anything serious with them!
Have you learnt much from your emulation developments?
Definitely. For example, until I started on the PC Engine's sound emulation I'd never actually done any sound programming before, but I'm quite proud of the results. It's impossible to immerse yourself in the low level details of a machine architecture without picking up all sorts of interesting little details.
What are you planning to do next?
Sleep lots, and then get down to some "real work" so I can afford a nice new machine to run Unix on.
Do you ever read my Acorn Emulation Site? :o)
But of course!
Anything you'd like to say?
Just a big thank-you to everybody who has offered information, ideas, support, etc...