32-bit Acorn Gaming
[News]
Latest Emulator News

News about the following emulators is currently available:

Also see the Emulators Feature for a general summary of Acorn emulators.

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

There is now an Acorn version of MAME - the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator - which lets you play lots of early arcade games in their original forms. The emulator pretends to be various arcade machines, and runs the original game ROM images which can be downloaded from the internet (although it is usually a breach of copyright to do so).

This means you can now play absolutely 100% authentic versions of many classic games from the late 1970s up to the mid 1980s. It's a fantastic achievement - the amount of work that has gone into the emulator by many different people is quite phenomenal. Each individual game reqires its own individual explicit emulation. MAME is effectively a large collection of emulators, each one for a single game, with the emulators sharing all their common routines as appropriate.

[!MAME][!MAME]The Acorn version requires a StrongARM to run at full speed, managing to run between two and three times too slow on an ARM710 (which isn't too bad, but the games aren't really 'playable' at that speed, in my opinion).

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

[PacMan screenshot]The excellent port 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 sound support). The Acorn release of the very latest versions is often made before most other platforms!

You can obtain MAME from the following URL: http://www.elecslns.demon.co.uk/MAME - about 260K
You might also like to get a desktop frontend for the emulator, called !Player1. You can get this from http://www.fwservices.com/graphite/fun/mfe.html.

[QBert screenshot]

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 new(ish) beta-release of this emulator which now has a nice desktop front-end for redefining the keys used is available from these web pages

Also, a brand new version (0.70) is currently being tested by beta-testers. This version includes proper desktop support for SRAM files, allowing you to save your game position when using games which support this. Expect an upload to these web pages in the next week or so assuming no major problems are found.

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Gareth Moore
Last updated 3/8/97