Virtual Acorn is the company set up to produce and market the commercial (and much faster) version of the Red Squirrel emulator. Red Squirrel is a useful tool, but it is Freeware, and hence unsupported, and comes without any hard disc image or operating system.
The Virtual Acorn emulators come in various versions, all of which emulate a RiscPC, but with the ability to support much higher resolution video. VRPC-SE and VRPC-SE SA are supplied with RISC OS 4.02, the former emulating am ARM 710 processor and the latter a Strong ARM. VRPC-ADJ and VRPC-ADJ SA are similar but supplied with a later version of the operating system, RISC OS 4.39, otherwise known as RISC OS Adjust. Both are 'ready to run' complete with the appropriate licensed version of RISC OS and a hard disc image with many useful applications.
Since there are various Acorn emulators for the PC you may wonder why you should pay for a commercial product. The answer is that with Virtual Acorn you get a fully supported and licensed version of RISC OS and the emulator is many times faster than any other emulator. In fact, it's so fast that, on a decent PC, it's actually faster that any curreently available hardware capable of running RISC OS natively and much faster than the machines it was intended to emulate, the Strong ARM RiscPC.
Although the emulators will work with Windows 95 or 98 this is not recommended. You need Windows 2000 or XP and an internal floppy drive to use Acorn format (800K or 1.6Mb) floppy discs. If you have Windows 95 or 98 or a laptop with an external (normally USB) floppy drive you will be able to use DOS format floppy disc but not Acorn format. Normally there are no problems with Acorn format CDs, although this does depend upon the actual make and model of CD drive fitted.
See the Virtual Acorn web site where you can find full details.
The earlier version of Virtual Acorn, Virtual A5000, has now been discontinued. We did have limited stocks of these but they have now all been sold. However we do sometimes acquire secondhand copies, so please do enquire if you would like a copy.
Our RISC 2 PC CD contains a copy of the Red Squirrel emulator, but although this is the software that the Virtual Acorn emulators are based upon it does not include any hard disc image or software or operating system ROM images and runs at less than one fifth the speed of the commercial programs.
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