32-bit Acorn Gaming
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Latest Emulator News

News about the following emulators is currently available:

Also see the Emulators Feature for a general summary of Acorn emulators including download links. This page (ie. the one you are currently viewing) only includes announcements made since September last year.

For full and totally comprehensive coverage of all Acorn emulators (plus the latest emulation news, as well as reviews) you should check out David Sharp's excellent and regularly-updated Acorn Emulation Pages. Well worth taking a look at.


PC Engine

Paul Clifford has released a port of Jens Ch. Restemeier's Virtual PC Engine emulator, allowing you to play original PC Engine games on your Acorn. Many top arcade games are available for the PC Engine, such as R-Type and various famous racing games, with the emulator averaging about 24 frames per second on a StrongARM. The current version has no sound, but is compatible with most PC Engine games - it won't work on pre-Risc PCs, however.

You can download the emulator from http://www.plasma.demon.co.uk/vpce/.


MAME

MAME - the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator - is an incredible emulation project which allows you to run many hundreds upon hundreds of different arcade games, exactly as if you had that original game right in front of you. All you need is the emulator plus the game ROM image of your choice, easily downloaded from the internet.

This means you can now play absolutely 100% authentic versions of many classic games from the late '70s right the way through to the early '90s. It's a fantastic achievement - the amount of work that has gone into the emulator by many different people really is quite phenomenal. Each individual game reqires its own individual emulation, although they all share common cores. MAME is effectively a large collection of emulators, therefore, all bundled into one enticing package.

[!MAME][!MAME]The Acorn version requires a StrongARM to run at full speed (although even that's not fast enough for some games), running at least two or three times too slow on an ARM710 (which isn't too surprising, but don't expect the games to be much fun at that speed!).

[Bombjack screenshot 1] [Bombjack screenshot 2]
You can now play classic arcade games such as Bombjack

[PacMan screenshot]The excellent Acorn version of MAME is by Gareth S Long (gatch@elecslns.demon.co.uk), and is being updated virtually every day, with continuously improving features (such as ever better sound and faster emulation). The Acorn release of the very latest versions is often made before many other platforms!

You can obtain MAME from the following URL: http://www.elecslns.demon.co.uk/MAME. You might also like to get a desktop frontend for the emulator, called !Player1. You can get this from http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/rcassidy/fun/.

[QBert screenshot]

As of 19/8/98 MAME supports 702 arcade machines.


Frodo

Frodo is a Freeware Commodore 64 emulator written in C++ by Christian Bauer, with the excellent Acorn port performed by Andreas Dehmel (dehmel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de). It runs at full-speed on a StrongARM, or about 20-40% on an A5000.

You can download this emulator from ftp.uni-stuttgart.de, ftp.uni-kl.de or the original site linked to in the previous paragraph.


Sega Game Gear/Master System

A brand new Sega Master System emulator, Miracle, was released a few months ago by
Richard Talbot-Watkins and Matthew Godbolt. This emulator runs at full speed even on slower Acorn machines, thanks to it being written entirely in hand-optimised machine code! It even has full and complete sound emulation. At the moment it runs 95% of Master System titles, but it is still in development and this figure will no doubt increase.

You can download the current version of this emulator from the author's web pages.

Miracle doesn't emulate the Game Gear, however, so if you want to play Game Gear games you'll need an alternative, much slower emulator which only runs fast enough on StrongARM machines - and it has pretty bad sound, too. Version 0.71 of that other emulator is available from these web pages. This is a port by me of Marat Fayzullin's MasterGear - an improved port of this (with full sound) is currently being worked on by David McEwen.


ColecoVision

David McEwen's port of the ColecoVision emulator [site may not be present yet!] has recently been updated to version 1.0, and allows you to play some "classic" games from the early 1980s. You can download the latest version from this site.

You can download some games from http://www.davesclassics.com/colecoroms.html

[ColecoVision emulator running Donkey Kong]


MSX

The MSX is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment, despite being officially abandoned 10 years ago, and a new port of Marat Fayzullin's MSX emulator brings the ability to join in the fun to Acorn users, thanks to the efforts of
David McEwen.

The MSX series of home computers were designed by ASCII corp and Microsoft (who - wait for it - wrote the operating system), and were released in 1982. They were very successful in Japan and some areas of Europe (including Russia!) and South America. The console was a 'technology platform' which was licensed to different manufactures - a bit like what Acorn are doing with the Network Computer - so companies like Yamaha, Sony and Toshiba all released their own versions of the hardware with various updates. These included the MSX2, MSX2+ and the MSX TurboR.

[Castlevania (VKiller)]Although the MSX only had a 3.58MHz processor, the system played host to several classic games, including Castlevania, Virtual Hydlide, Out Run, Bubble Bobble and Metal Gear (shortly due for a vastly updated release on the PlayStation as Metal Gear Solid). Rather strangely, perhaps, home enthusiasts are now continuing to develop games for the platform, and clones of games such as Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog are now available. In fact, recently a large show just for MSX fans was held in Japan, with over 20,000 people attending! This is a bit obsessive, if you ask me, but there you go.

The Acorn emulator comes with a comprehensive set of OS ROMs, allowing you to emulate an MSX, MSX2 or MSX2+. You can download the emulator from http://www.lizjay.demon.co.uk/david [site may not be present yet!], but you need a Risc PC or A7000 because it requires a fully-redefinable 256-colour screenmode. However, it won't work at all on my ARM710 Risc PC, and sometimes when I attempt to run it it hangs the machine completely, so take care. It also doesn't load all the Toolbox modules it needs, so if you get a SWI not found error when you attempt to run it then try double-clicking all your Toolbox modules!

If you're looking for games, then you can start off here: http://www.aditfree.com/emu/msx.html (but note that some of the games linked to on that site aren't actually there!). Note that downloading some or all of these ROM images may constitute a breach of copyright.


NES

Prolific emulator porter
David McEwen has recently produced a new Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator, ARCNes. This improves on his previous ports of xNes, and in particular runs much faster - it's also faster than the NES emulator in MESS.

The emulator may be available from David's web site by now, or look for it on Acorn User's forthcoming cover CD-ROM 4.


Macintosh

Anyone who's just read the above
MSX, ColecoVision and NES reports won't be surprised to find that the author of a port of VMac, the Macintosh emulator, is none other than David McEwen! He's still in reasonably early stages of porting at the moment, so I wouldn't expect a release any time too soon.

MESS

MESS, the "Multiple Emulation Super System", is just that - an emulator which allows you to run games written for various different systems, and in particular a whole stack of games consoles, including the Sega Megadrive and Nintendo Entertainment System. The Megadrive emulator gives access to some of the most successful games ever, such as the seminal Sonic the Hedgehog.

This work of art is part-developed by Gareth Long, who is entirely responsible for the Acorn version. Available from his web site, you can download it right now in just a few clicks! It must be said that it's disappointingly slow on my Risc PC 700, however - the NES emulator runs at about 2 frames per second, and the Megadrive one runs at between 1 and 3 seconds per frame! Using frame skip you can run some of the console emulations at the correct speed on a StrongARM, however.

MESS uses a system of console drivers instead of emulating each machine separately - the NES driver, for example, is provided by the xNES team. The core development team is small, consisting of Gareth Long, Brad Oliver and two others.

This is a true worldwide freeware project involving people from across the globe, but, as Gareth points out, it can be truly said that right from the outset it began on Acorn machines! It's also the very first publically available Megadrive emulator for Acorn machines, even if it does run remarkably slowly. Speedier versions will be available in time as some of the C code is replaced with assembler cores. Regular updates are appearing, and each offers many improvements.

As of 19/8/98, the latest version is 0.02 beta 4.1.


SNES

An Acorn port of SNES9X is now available, thanks (yet again) to
Gareth Long. Running at as much as full speed on StrongARM machines and surprisingly fast even on lesser ones, it is a truly incredible piece of work that emulates the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System (also known as the Super Famicom) as well as some of the common add-on processors. It's a port of the latest sources, too, so it's certainly true that in the emulation stakes Acorns are one of the leaders in the personal computer stakes. You can download SNES9X from Gareth Long's web site.

As of 19/8/98 the latest version is 'test 03'.

[Super Mario World title-page] [Super Mario World in-game]
Screenshots taken from the Acorn version of SNES9X


Stella - Atari VCS 2600

Between them Gareth Long and David McEwen seem to have the emulator-porting market sewn-up! This latest port is from
David McEwen and is of Stella, a full Atari VCS 2600 emulator (currently on version 1.0 beta). It runs at full speed on a StrongARM, according to the release notes.

For the latest version check out David's website at http://www.lizjay.demon.co.uk/david [may not be present yet], or download it from this site.


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©Gareth Moore
Last updated 19/8/98