Unsurprisingly, given the technically-orientated nature of many Acorn affinados, there are several such emulators available for the Acorn platform. Many of them are free, but some cost a small amount - usually less than 20 pounds.

So what emulators are currently available?

The first emulator for 32-bit Acorns was Acorn's own !65Host, which was supplied with all Acorn computers up until a few years ago. It converted your brand new machine into a copy of an original BBC Model B Microcomputer. It wouldn't run all software - particularly technically clever games - but it did a fair enough job and managed to run most educational software which, afterall, was its raison d'être. It won't run on Risc PCs without a simple patch, however, which Acorn don't supply. Anyone can download !65Host from Acorn's FTP site.

If you want to emulate a BBC Micro then you'd be better off by far with Warm Silence Software's !6502Em BBC emulator. As well as pretending to be a Model B it can also be a Master, Electron and Master Compact so long as you can get hold of suitable ROM images from those computers. Unlike Acorn's effort it will run virtually all BBC games, including Exile, Elite, Revs and many, many more. It even allows !Speech to work, which is very impressive. And at £15 it's reasonably priced. There's a list of some compatible games on these web pages.

PC emulators have also been around for some years, with both Acorn's PCEm - now known as PC Soft - and Dave Lawrence's FasterPC being available. Both will only run "earlier" PC software - recent releases will either run attrociously slowly or not at all. FasterPC, unsurprisingly, aims to run more quickly than Acorn's effort. The current version of PC Soft is 1.86, which supports the newer hardware in Risc PC computers. If you want to run a DOS-only version of Lotus 123, say, then you're fine with one of these software emulators, but for anything more complex - and certainly anything involving Windows - you need a physical PC card.

Risc PCs can have a variety of different PC cards fitted into their second processor slot, with prices starting at £99 plus VAT if bought with the machine. A good bargain is the 133Mhz 586 available from CJE Micros (email cjemicro@pavilion.co.uk) for £350 inclusive when you trade in an SX33 card (which many people bought with their Risc PCs for £99), or £460 inclusive without the trade-in. Either way you get good performance for a reasonable price (although 586s don't have the floating point performance of Pentiums, and if you're looking to run action games on the card then you really need to buy a StrongARM to get a fast enough screen update). If you want to see what games will work on a PC card, then check out the PC Games Compatibility list.

PC cards for earlier computers are available from Aleph One Limited. These are more expensive since they are effectively almost an entire computer on a card, and also require their own memory (they can't share the host computer's memory). Still, if you don't have a Risc PC then they're your only choice. You're probably better off buying a cheap PC system, really. A good 486 or medium range Pentium isn't really very expensive in comparison.

Another popular computer from yesteryear is the Sinclair Spectrum, for which there are at least four Acorn emulators available. The only commercial emulator is Warm Silence Software's !Z80Em, which costs £15 (although you can buy both !6502Em and !Z80Em together for £25, saving £5), and you can buy a CD of old Spectrum games to go with it if you like. The emulator will run just about any Spectrum game you choose, and at exactly the right speed, and will import files in a whole range of different formats.

For those who don't fancy spending any money you could try Graham Willmott's !MZX, which does a great job of playing Spectrum games and will even run in the Desktop (albeit slowly). On a Risc PC, however, you need The ARM Club's Game On! for it to work, and the sound only works on pre-A5000 machines. Overall !Z80Em is the better choice, but then you do have to pay for it. Other possibilities are Karsten Witt's !Speccy and Dave Lawrence's Speculator).

Warm Silence Software also sell an Amstrad CPC emulator, !CPC, written by Mark Rison. The emulation it offers is now near-perfect, running the vast majority of all games (and apparently Chuckie Egg on it is better than the BBC version!). The next release will also offer multitasking and ZX81 emulation. There's also a free CPC emulator written by Andreas Stroiczek, called !CPCEm, and currently on version 1.02. It's available from the University of Stuttgart FTP site and also Koeln University's FTP site. The free emulator supports sound.

Commodore 64 fans are not forgotten, either, since German company Pulse Computer are now selling Denys Bogatz's C64 emulator. Further details can be obtained by emailing Pulse Computer at pulse@evolution.org, by writing to Am Fröschlanger 15, 83512 Wasserburg, Germany, or telephoning +49 08071 52921. Another C64 emulator is the freeware Frodo, ported by Andreas Dehmel (dehmel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de). It runs at full-speed on a StrongARM, or about 20-40% on an A5000. The latest version can always be found at http://wwwzenger.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/persons/dehmel/Software.html.

If you're feeling very ambitious you could even try out UAE, an Amiga emulator! But don't expect it to be very fast, or for everything you try to work.

But some of us don't want the intricacies of an entire home computer - we just want to play games which we can't play on our own system. As a means to this end Purple Monchichi's !Gameboy emulator for the Nintendo Gameboy system is a useful tool, and what's more it's completely free. The latest 0.56 version runs the majority of Gameboy games, supports sound, and will run up to speed on fast Acorn computers. Utilities for it making it easier to redefine the colours and keys used are available from Rosemary Miskin's web pages. However, there is also a newer version available from Paul Clifford which, among other improvements, allows games to be saved. The current version of this improved release is 0.04, dated November 18th 1996. Enquiries can be sent to gameboy@plasma.demon.co.uk.

There is also a Sega Game Gear and Master System emulator currently available, imaginatively titled !Sega. Since I ported this myself you can download this from these web pages right now! Full details are here. Unfortunately it will only run on Risc PCs or A7000s, and it runs 2.5 times too slowly even on an ARM710. It runs at full speed on a StrongARM, however, although currently it doesn't support sound, but it does run most games, which is the main thing! Another emulator from the same author, Marat Fayzullin, this time ported by David McEwen, is a ColecoVision games console emulator. This is available from http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~dem95c, with which you can play certain "classic" games from the 1980s. Also ported by David from Marat is an MSX emulator. Using this last you can play classic games like Castlevania, Virtual Hydlide, Out Run, Bubble Bobble and Metal Gear. There are lots more details about this emulator elsewhere on these web pages.

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/.

There is also an excellent 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.

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). The excellent Acorn 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 http://www.elecslns.demon.co.uk/MAME. You can read more about Acorn MAME on these web pages, including details of the current version.

So where can you get games from for these emulators? Have a look at The Archive for the low-down!

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