RPCEmu

From RISC OS
Revision as of 19:23, 15 April 2007 by TomWalker (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigationJump to search

RPCEmu - Open Source RiscPC Emulator

riscos.info maintains the source repository for RPCEmu, developed by Tom Walker. Peter Naulls did the port to Linux. Chris Williams did the Mac OS X PPC port. RPCEmu is an interpretative emulator of Acorn RiscPC-class hardware. It includes working emulation of ARM6, ARM7 and StrongARM cores, IDE and Floppy emulation, VIDC20 and IOMD chipset emulation, and other features.

Present limitations:

  • No access to host drives - floppy or optical.
  • No network access.

A dynamic recompiler is being developed and an early version is in SVN. It presently only works on 32-bit x86 machines, emulating a StrongARM in RISC OS 3.7, 4.02 and 4.39. It needs more testing, but can run RISC OS and the majority of applications at nearly twice the speed of the interpreter.

Developer help wanted

In case you are a developer and want to spend some time on RPCEmu project, this is a non-exhaustive list of ideas to get you inspired:

  • It would be a good thing to have Windows, Linux and Mac OS X ports unified.
  • Address its emulation limitations (like host drive and network access)

Make sure you involve Tom Walker when doing development on RPCEmu.

References

Emulation of RISC OS
Emulators:
RPCEmu, QEMU, Arcem, VirtualAcorn, RedSquirrel, Arculator