The popular open-source RiscPC emulator RPCEmu has had an update. Version 0.8.10 is available now. The changes since the last release include various bug fixes and extensive under-the-bonnet refactoring in preparation for future improvements.
 
More work has been done on RISC OS Open Limited's IOMD RISC OS ROM for RiscPC class hardware and emulators such as RPCEmu. The IOMD ROM is now mostly complete. In related news, benchmarking has shown that RISC OS 5 runs faster under emulation than 26-bit versions of the OS.
 
As for Archimedes emulation, the open-source Archimedes emulator ArcEm was updated to version 1.50 at the end of last year. (Yes, we're a bit late with that.) An extensive change log details what's changed since the previous release. The main improvement between this release and the earlier ArcEm 1.50-alpha was to fix operation on the Raspberry Pi.
 

Here's a quick round up of some of the recent activities in the RISC OS world.

London Show reminder

Next weekend, Saturday the 27th of October, is the date for this years London show. The show is to be held at the usual location of the St Giles Hotel in Feltham, London, and will be open from 11AM to 5PM. Tickets cost £5 on the door.
 
Although the theatre presentation schedule isn't yet available, the exhibitor's list is. Apart from all the usual subjects you should also keep an eye out for ROOL's first official, stable release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi.

ROOL updates

As mentioned above, the first stable release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi is expected to be unveiled at this years London show. The port has come on a long way since it was first shown at last years show, and is now pretty much on par with the other platforms with regards to features and usability. The distribution is to be available in the form of an SD card complete with ROM image, !Boot sequence, and a selection of pre-installed software, based around the work Chris Hall and others have placed into the Pi alpha distro.
 
Other news from ROOL in recent months includes:

• The release of SDFS, an SD card filing system for all the modern machines (BeagleBoard/ARMini, PandaBoard, Raspberry Pi)
• The release of several 32bit compatible NIC drivers for the RiscPC/A7000 (previously the IOMD port of RISC OS 5 had no drivers available, except under emulation)
• Work on step one of the multi-stage filing system improvements bounty has begun
• There have also been several performance improvements over the past few months - faster remapping of memory and shorter drive mount times, resulting in significantly shorter boot times for modern machines, faster font plotting, and last but not least a SmartReflex driver to allow the BeagleBoard-xM/ARMini to run at its full speed of 1GHz instead of 800MHz.

GCC 4.1.2 release 2 released

Hot on the heels of release 1 of GCC 4.1.2, the RISC OS GCCSDK team have released release 2, with a focus on fixing the bugs that were found in the initial release.

Emulation news

• Aemulor Pro now freely available for ARMv7 machines
  A new version of Aemulor Pro, compatible with all the modern ARMv7 machines (BeagleBoard, ARMini, PandaBoard, etc.) is now available to download free of charge from the Spellings website at http://buyit.spellings.net/. A Raspberry Pi compatible version is expected to appear in due course.
• ArcEm 1.50 alpha available
  The ArcEm team are back with a new website and a new alpha release. Compared to the previous 1.00 release there have been many significant improvements. In particular the RISC OS version is now ARMv6/ARMv7 compatible, and fast enough to play most Arc games at full speed on an Iyonix. Members of R-Comp's ARMini/BeagleBoard/PandaLand support schemes also have access to a more polished version of the emulator, and several games to play on it, under the moniker !AcornMode.
• Atari emulator Hatari ported to RISC OS
  In recent weeks Franck Martinaux has released a RISC OS port of version 1.6.2 of the Atari ST emulator Hatari. The emulator is reported to run at full speed on BB-xM, and is available from Franck's website at http://www.norisc-nofun.co.uk/software.html.

 

The Register has a nice write-up charting the rise and fall of the Archimedes range. OK, so some of it was cribbed from Chris Whytehead's Acorns site (with credits), but it's nice to see a 4-page writeup on a major tech website.
 
We have cake here in the office, but apparently it's not for this, it's for something else going on next week.
 

It's about time we had another one of these, isn't it? As you've probably guessed, this time I'm looking at Burn 'Out, an arcade-style racing game released by Oregan in 1995, and rather heavily influenced by the arcade classic Power Drift.
 
 

Acorn World - now there's a name from the past. The final show was cancelled in 1998 when Acorn closed its workstations division - now it's back thanks to Dave Moore and the Retro Reunited team. The show, held over the weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, offered a range of vintage games consoles and bizarre Acorn hardware hacks. The Acorn scene was mostly 8-bit oriented although there was some RISC OS coverage too.
 

Gareth Moore wrote in to let us know that, as foretold in the forums, the "Brits Who Made the Modern World" series is a big rip-off of the book "The Backroom Boys". No, wait, that wasn't it.
 
The final episode airs on August 22nd at 7:30pm on Five. Go on, guess what it's about.
 
  12 comments in the forums

 

I figured it was about time for another oldschool review. This time I'll be talking about LASER, a game written by Mike Goldberg (and his cat) as part of his series of graphics programming articles in Acorn Computing magazine. The game was released on the subscription disc for the February 1994 issue of the magazine, along with a level editor so users could make their own puzzles.