[HN Gopher] ArcEm - The Acorn Archimedes Emulator
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ArcEm - The Acorn Archimedes Emulator
Author : DerekBickerton
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-09-26 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arcem.sourceforge.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (arcem.sourceforge.net)
| vidarh wrote:
| You got to love an emulator showcasing an archaic OS with
| screenshots taken on other archaic OS's (and I'm not intending
| that in a snarky way; it shows how old some of the early home-
| computer emulators now are becoming)
| trebligdivad wrote:
| The 'archaic' is kind of fun - when I wrote this originally in
| '95-'97 the machines were ~10 years old; that was old for the
| time. But that point was over 20 years ago - so the time since
| I wrote the emulator is much longer than the time from the
| hardware to the emulator.
| fidotron wrote:
| In the case of the original ARM2 hardware things are
| scarce/expensive now.
|
| Those outside the RISC OS world may be surprised that in market
| potential terms RISC OS peaked at 2. By the time 3 came along
| PCs were displacing the Archimedes almost everywhere, and one
| consequence of that is a lot of software, especially early
| games, never made it even to the Risc PC.
| louthy wrote:
| Which is a shame 'cos the RISC PC was an absolute beast of a
| machine for the time.
| fidotron wrote:
| The StrongARM upgrade was phenomenal, but clearly pushing
| the machine to the limit. Acorn seemed to have a dangerous
| disinterest in floating point performance though.
|
| On some level I have grown to believe that Acorn were
| deliberately not producing competitive desktop machines so
| as to keep ARM off the Intel radar. It has become clear
| from some leaked documents from Acorn (and discussion on
| here) that they appreciated the game was up, except for the
| niche enthusiasts, long before the Risc PC was announced.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Indeed, it was incredibly powerful for the price. The games
| that came out for it didn't really show what it could do,
| most were either straight Amiga ports or even more
| amateurish than Amiga games tended to me.
| trollied wrote:
| Originally written by this chap in the late 1990s:
| http://www.treblig.org
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Yep, that's me! Heck, how did this land on HN - it's not had
| anything done to it for _AGES_. It was definitely a fun program
| to write, not long after I wrote BeebEm :-).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Thank you!
| trollied wrote:
| I also went to Manchester in the 90s. I emailed you as a
| naive youngster asking if you knew a friend that was also a
| Gilbert. heh.
| lproven wrote:
| RPCemu is much more modern:
|
| https://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/index.php
|
| If you just want the OS on x86 with minimal hassle there is also
| a commercial emulator:
|
| http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm
|
| This company now owns the source code for one of the two forks of
| RISC OS. The other is now fully FOSS and runs natively on the
| Raspberry Pi:
|
| https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
|
| Here is a good beginner's distro of it:
|
| https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| is RPCemu still maintained? Last updated (even on their
| mercurial) seems to be from 2021.
| Narishma wrote:
| That's more recent than ArcEm's last update from 2017.
| intothemild wrote:
| This is cool, I remember using Acorn computers, and I liked RISC
| OS at the time.
| esafak wrote:
| So can you run the Domesday Project (off a virtual LaserDisc)?
| trebligdivad wrote:
| You'd want a Beeb emulator for that not an Arc; some work has
| been done on the Beeb emulator for that (although not sure
| what's still around). There was a fun meeting of the Chamelion
| project that came out of Uni Leeds many years ago when they
| were doing exactly that and a bunch of BBC people around.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There's a blast from the past. All kinds of neurons started
| firing on that mention and they had plenty of dust and cobwebs
| on them. "The future of interactive computing"... how little we
| knew.
| Symbiote wrote:
| For context, this emulates RISC OS [1], the operating system
| designed for the Acorn Archimedes computer[2] -- which used the
| ARM 2 CPU [3] designed by Acorn. Originally, "ARM" meant "Acorn
| RISC Machine".
|
| RISC OS can also be installed on a Raspberry Pi [4].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM2
|
| [4] https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi
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(page generated 2023-09-26 23:01 UTC)