Acorn Emulation Latest News

Details of all previous updates, can be viewed online - recommended reading.

I've managed to find a few spare moments this Summer to update the site a little. There are many things I still want to update, particularly the ROM links and many of the pages for David McEwen's latest releases, with a bit of help from David and Mike, these will hopefully be done sometime in the next few weeks, so look out for another update soon.

Chris Lloyd has released the new version of Archie, v0.5 now supports RISC OS desktop AND floppy disk access. PC owners may think that UltraHLE has to be the highpoint of emulation for the year, I'm not sure I'd disagree but Archie comes, at least for me, a close second. (Note, you might want to look at the Acorn section of this website for some important resources)

BeebIt v0.5 has been released by Michael Foot, with general improvements to all aspects of the emulator biring it closer to being a freeware competitor with 6502em.

With a recent new release of ZSNES (a SNES emu for the PC) has come a much awaited development in SNES emulation. Finally, reasonable emulation of the SuperFX chip used by games such as Star Fox, has allowed this epic game to be playable (previously, no 3D shapes were visable). Previously the ZSNES and Snes9X teams have been very prone to sharing new information, in such a way that DSP1 emulation for MarioKart was used in Snes9X shortly after being developed by the ZSNES team. The same thing appears to have happened again with the latest updates of the Snes9X page reporting that the ZSNES details are now part of the Snes9X code. An updated port for the Acorn allowing Star Fox to be played under RISC OS could well be in the pipeline. In such a situation, if Gatch cannot find the time to port Snes9X, David McEwen has said he'll do the job. It looks like StarFox here we come...

I've heard rumours that James Ponder has been further developing Generator, his dynamic recompiling Megadrive emulator before a release. Hopefully when the source code is available then David McEwen will turn his hand to porting it to the Acorn. Failing this, David has been looking at the DGen source code (a megadrive emulator for the PC and Unix, written in C) and is considering porting this to RISC OS, unfortunately though the 68000 CPU which needs to be emulated is reverse-endian to the ARM and as it's written in C could be painfully slow.

As if he hasn't been up to enough, David McEwen has now also got hold of and is looking at a copy of the source code to Meka, Zoop's Sega Master System/Game Gear emulator for the PC. It features the best front end yet seen in a Master System emulator with many features and a very high standard of compatibility, with even support for older but similar Sega consoles/computers. Even if it takes some time for Meka to appear, the latest version of MasterGear, due for release on the Acorn soon already supports these antiquated systems.

The Spirit in the Contraption website has recently gone back online, and even while it's still being updated is still a very good place to get ROM images to play on your emulators, for almost any system you want.

David McEwen is currently working on porting Handy, an Atari Lynx emulator for the PC to the Acorn.

David McEwen has been testing out a few different graphical representations for use in his emulator ports. These have been a common thing for some time in PC emulators, with various implementations of TV-style interlaced modes, or Eagle mode which adjust the image on screen to make it look more presentable or more representative of the old appearance of consoles on TV screens. David has put up a preview page as part of his web site so that you can see things that he's working on even before they're actually ready for release, head over there to take a look at some of the latest developments. Below you can see an example of an early implementation of an interlacing (TV-style) mode in MasterGear, running Sonic the Hedgehog with and without interlacing.

Previous update: Monday 25/1/99