RPCEmu Windows Tips

Installing RPCEmu on Windows
There are a number of prebuilt versions of RPCEmu for Windows available:


 * RPCEmu Spoon Edition
 * Tom Walker's builds

But it's also possible to compile it from the trunk source. See below.

Building RPCEmu
First you need SVN, MinGW and Allegro for MinGW. Download them from here:


 * SVN
 * MinGW
 * Allegro for MinGW

Install SVN by running the downloaded MSI file. In the Setup wizard you click 'Next' and 'Next' again. In the next window keep the selected Apache option and click 'Next'. Keep the default installation path. Click 'Next' again and then 'Install'. When the installation is done click 'Finish' to close wizard. SVN is now installed.

Install MinGW by running the downloaded EXE file. In the Setup wizard you choose 'Download and Install' and click on 'Next'. Now click 'I Agree' and in the next window choose 'Current package' and click 'Next'. Select the following components: Click 'Next' when the files are downloaded and installed and click 'Finish' to close wizard. Now go to the Computer Icon and open the properties dialogue. Click tab 'Advanced' (Vista: Advanced property settings) and next button 'Environment variables' Go to system variables and select the 'Path' variable and click 'Edit'. Add the following line at the end of the path ;C:\Program Files\MinGW\bin and click 'OK'. Off course if you installed MinGW somewhere else then adjust this path accordingly. MinGW in now installed.
 * MinGW base
 * g++ compiler
 * MinGW make

It's possible that the MinGW installer fails to download some files. You can solve this by downloading them manually from here. Place the files in the same folder where the installer lives and run the installer again.

Install the Allegro library by extracting the downloaded archive and copy the contents as follows:
 * 1) Copy DLL files from bin to your Windows/System32 folder.
 * 2) Copy the contents of the include folder to your MinGW/include folder.
 * 3) Copy the contents of the lib folder to your MinGW/lib folder.

Open the command prompt (cmd.exe) and go to a folder where you want to install RPCEmu (e.g. C:\Program Files). Get the lates RPCEmu package with subversion. If you have a firewall for outgoing traffic you may need to open TCP and UDP port 3690 to allow this. Enter the next command to download the latest sources of RPCEmu:

svn co svn://svn.riscos.info/rpcemu/trunk RPCEmu

After downloading:

cd RPCEmu/src/

Now you have two options. Create the interpreter version of rpcemu or the dynamic recompiler. The first one is slower but more stable and it's possible to select an ARM processor. The recompiler version has the advantage to be five times faster but only runs the StrongARM (SA) processor. If you want to run the SA processor under RISC OS 4 then I recommend the recompiler because of a current problem in the interpreter with bad screen redraws and abort on data transfers in 16 bits per pixel modes. The dynamic recompiler only works on x86 host processors.

If you want to make the recompiler you have to edit Makefile.mingw and remove // from the line: //DYNAREC=1

Otherwise leave Makefile.mingw</tt> intact to make the interpreter.

To compile the binary enter the next command:

mingw32-make -f Makefile.mingw

If there were no errors then you successfully compiled the emulator.

Sharing HostFS with Virtual Risc PC
RPCEmu currently expects to find files shared between the host OS and RISC OS in a hostfs folder at the same level as RPCEmu.exe. If your disc is formatted with NTFS you can use symbolic links to join this to another folder, perhaps the one used by VRPC. Try using these features:


 * Windows 2000, Windows XP
 * Windows Vista