RPCEmu

This is the site for RPCEmu, the continued development of the popular Acorn machine emulator by Tom Walker. It emulates an Acorn RiscPC and A7000.

• Introduction
• Documentation
• Downloads
• Release Notes
• Developer Information

RPCEmu allows you to emulate classic Acorn systems, such as the Risc PC and A7000, on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X

RPCEmu requires a RISC OS ROM image to work, find details of where to find one.

RPCEmu should be considered Alpha Quality code. It has many known and unknown bugs, and all files used with it should be well backed up before using them with RPCEmu.

The following documents are available here.

• User Manual - All platforms.
• Using ROOL RISC OS 5 - All platforms.
• How to compile from source - Windows
• How to compile from source - Linux/UNIX

If you have any questions or need help, there is a RPCEmu Mailing List, however please specify the version number to avoid confusion. Your patches, suggestions and even bug reports are gratefully recieved.

Binary Packages (Version 0.8.7)

Source Code (Version 0.8.7)

Contributed Builds

Previous Releases

Additional Downloads

Not all features are available on all platforms, check the matrix below for details

Version 0.8.7 - 1/9/2010

Changes in this build

This release contains lots of updates to the networking support; as such a new section to the manual has been written explaining how to setup networking on Linux and Windows:

The support for RISC OS 5 has changed a fair amount since the last release. Please see the updated documentation here:

• Windows
• Added networking support using 'bridged' network style (Leo Smiers); works with the win32 TAP interface (from the QEMU project) and uses the OpenVPN TUN/TAP drivers.
• Two fixes have reduced the likelihood of encountering a crash when using fullscreen mode.
• Linux and Windows
• Network GUI: a GUI to assist in configuring the network settings is available. For more details see the Networking section of the manual mentioned above.
• All Platforms
• A considerable number of fixes to the accuracy of HostFS as a RISC OS filing system.
• Add support for .iso image files that are > 2GiB in size. Previously some of the data would have been inaccessible.
• Added suport for the scrollwheel on PS/2 mouse emulation; this only works with the ARM7500 or ARM7500FE (A7000 and A7000+ are the only hardware with PS2 mouse ports). Also requires RISC OS support from RISC OS Select (not present on earlier versions) and for you not to be using 'Follow Host Mouse'.
• Improved emulation of the I2C bus and Real Time Clock. Allows RISC OS 5.17 RTC autodetection to work. (Based on code by Jochen Karrer from the Softgun project).
• 'Follow Host Mouse' is now 32-bit compliant and working on RISC OS 5 (Timothy Coltman)
• Configure script for source compilation on 'Unix' systems no longer stops if it's not Linux.
• Significant refactoring of code, particularly mouse handling sections, SWI handling and Networking.

Version 0.8.6 - 23/12/2009

Changes in this build

• Mac OS X
• Experimental support for DynaRec on Intel-based Mac OS X platforms.
• All Platforms
• More work refactoring the ARM emulation core to simplify and reduce code.
• Several minor ARM fixes.
• Added support for ARM7500FE and ARM810. ARM7500FE currently offers no floating-point performance advantage. ARM810 is largely experimental and only has limited support from most versions of RISC OS.
• Fixed two crash bugs in IDE code relating to switching between Hard Disk and CD-ROM emulation. Thanks to Francis Devereux for good bug reporting and analysis.
• Simplified and standardised MIPS display in title bar on all platforms. On Linux the MIPS counter is no longer displayed on the console.
• Significant refactoring of code, particularly the DynaRec and sound sections.

Version 0.8.5 - 23/08/2009

Changes in this build

• Compatibility Note
• Because the DynaRec is no longer restricted to StrongARM processor type, you must explicitly choose StrongARM emulation to retain full backwards compatibility. Either edit the rpc.cfg config file or use the GUI to change processor type.
  Note that the DynaRec support for processor types other than StrongARM is experimental.
• All Platforms
• Add the SyncClock module by David Ruck (modified and tested to be 32-bit compatible). This module will regularly synchronise the RISC OS clock with the host machine to compensate for clock drift. It is enabled by default.
• Improvements to co-processor 15 emulation mean that RISC OS 3.60 correctly no longer works with StrongARM emulation (like real hardware).
• Some fixes to MMU emulation regarding virtual to physical address mapping and permission checking.
• Much work refactoring the ARM emulation core to simplify and reduce code.
• Minor improvements to IOMD relating to interrupt handling.
• Significant refactoring of code, including removal of redundant or duplicate code, and addition of numerous comments.

Version 0.8.4 - 05/05/2009

Changes in this build

• All Platforms
• Experimental support for ROOL RISC OS 5.15 IOMD ROM image. However there are many issues, please follow this link for more details.
  http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/ro5.html
• Fix redraw issues when no VRAM is configured.
• Continuing source code tidying.
• Linux/MacOS X
• Mouse following (mousehack) can now be configured via the rpc.cfg file.

Version 0.8.3 - 15/04/2009

Changes in this build

• Linux
• Faster 64-bit DynaRec code by Tom Walker
• All Platforms
• Several ARM decode and execution bugs fixed, leading to...
• Can boot Pace RISC OS 4 and experimental support for RISC OS 6 Preview 3 (but see Known Issues below)
• Fixed screen corruption when using interpreter and StrongARM with RISC OS 4
• Increasing memory size using GUI no longer crashes RPCEmu
• Small performance increase to DynaRec 32-bit due to refactoring
• Continuing source code tidying
• Known Issues
• RISC OS 6 Preview 3 will only boot with Interpreter if processor type is StrongARM
• RISC OS 6 Preview 3 will not yet boot with 64-bit DynaRec

Version 0.8.2 - 09/02/2009

Changes in this build

• Windows
• Fix shortcut StartIn issues.
• Mac OS X
• Now compiles and runs on Mac OS X (Intel) by Timothy Coltman, no patching required.
• All Platforms
• Support more fullscreen modes.
• Set the year portion of the time (stored in CMOS ram) to always be correct, and generate CMOS checksum. Based on work by Kees Grinwis.
• ARM processor IDs corrected.
• Continuing source code tidying.

Version 0.8.1 - 16/01/2009

Changes in this build

• Windows
• Fixed mapping of \ and # keys.
• Removed console window.
• Correctly return year portion of CMOS time.
• Linux and Windows
• Correctly return the CMOS time, regardless of when it is called.
• Reject ROM images that are not 2MB, 4MB or 6MB in size and inform the user. This should prevent people trying to run compressed Select ROM images directly.
• Continuing source code tidying.

Version 0.8.0 - 30/12/2008

Changes in this build

• HostFS available out of the box.
• Some HostFS issues resolved
• RPCEmu Issue Tracker issues resolved.
  • RPCI001 - Pause/Break Key is now working.
  • RPCI003 - Clock is synchronised with Host on startup.
• Keyboard repeat issue resolved
• Easy installation on Windows

We're very happy for RPCEmu to accept code and contributions from third parties, already many people have contributed code and we hope to continue down this route.

The RPCEmu source is stored inside the Mercurial version control system, Mercurial clients are available for many platforms, including (but not limited too) Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSDs. If you are used to a different version control system, such as CVS or SVN, Mercurial (as a distributed version control system) may seem a little odd, but there are plenty of tutorials and advice for users coming from other systems on the web.

The Mercurial repository is based at

http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu

and checking out the code is as simple as

hg clone http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu rpcemu

How to get code committed into the repository. Prepare a patch file of the differences between your new code and the current 'HEAD' of the project.

Mercurial provides the 'hg diff' command, which generates diff files suitable for this.

Then post this patch file to the mailing list (or too us directly if you so wish), with an explanation of what it's for, and in the case of bug fixes, the bug it's meant to fix (it's not always obvious from the code)

Generally the smaller the patch, with the most specific function or reason, the easier the patch is to merge in, whereas a "I fixed everything I thought was wrong" would take a very long time to verify and test.

Patches may get edited before being committed, or if the changes required are particularly large an updated patch may be requested of the developer. In some rare cases it might not be possible to commit a patch, and at that point there should be a stated reason (e.g. patch overlaps with another patch that deprecates it, patch is too widespread to verify (suggest breaking into smaller patches), etc).

If you have any questions, once again the mailing list is the best place to ask, also, if you're considering a particulaly large change, that would affect a large functional area or many files, it might well be worth getting some advice from the developers on the mailing list first, incase it overlaps with other development work, or even just a suggestion of how to accomplish it in smaller changes.