ArcEm - Acorn Archimedes emulator - 68k build

[chris]

Anybody fancy a play?  You can download here and you will need a ROM image as described here.

I ran it on my A1200 (68030@40MHz) and it took about half an hour to boot (and I'm still waiting for the contents of HostFS to show on screen), so I'd be interested to hear how it runs on anything beefier.

I've included !SICK in the HostFS dir for benchmarking purposes, please post your results if you don't die of old age before it completes.

Oh, and don't bother running it on OS4; it's dog slow there too - use the native PPC version (due an update - the current CVS is much faster - but that one is still quicker than the latest under 68k emulation)

[chris]

I gave it a try, but trying to use it simply tells me that the path "audio" cant be found. Just as a guess I tried assigning it to the the arcem folder, but that just makes it do nothing.
Any clues please ?


edit:
I just had another look using snoopdos, and it tries to open "audio:bits/16/c/2/f/44100/t/signed".

I assume its trying to initialise sound, but trying to open it as a path instead?

Firstly, please download again, I accidentally put an old buggy version in the archive.

Secondly, the sound uses the AUDIO: device which installs alongside AHI (L:AHI-Handler). You might find AUDIO mountlist hiding in SYS:Storage/DOSDrivers if AHI is already installed.  Alternatively, there is an outside chance that this will work.

[chris]

Thanks, its working now.
Unfortunately Im not particularly familiar with RiscOS, nor Arcem, so Im a little blind here.

Middle mouse button (if you have one) is for menus.  Apps show up in the task bar towards the right-hand side (next to the palette).  Drag'n'drop is everywhere.  F12 (if you have it) lets you run *commands (DOS prompt basically).  Middle-clicking the Acorn logo is the GUI way of getting to the *commands prompt.  Oh, and all applications are directories - hold shift and double-click one to see.

Something doesnt seem quite right though, its pretty slow, but "feels" like omething is holding it back.
I ran !Sick, which took about 5 minutes to complete, and reported back that I have a 2.9ish mhz machine @2.1mips per mhz.
The whole time the cursor flickers, and it just feels like its struggling.

All sounds reasonable and one would think that it's simply pushing the host hardware, but something about the "feel" just didnt seem right, so I decided to run a 640x480 divx file at the same time and rerun arcem.

Lo and behold the results where pretty much identical.
Any tips please on how to assign more resources to the emulator?

That sounds about right, early versions on OS4 were the same, it's literally due to lack of emulated CPU.

If you click Apps, double-click !Configure and go into the mouse settings, increasing the speed should help a little.

You can also have a play around with the tooltypes.
Take out:
AUTOUPDATEFLAGS
Set:
USEUPDATEFLAGS
FRAMESKIP= (pick a number)

You might like to try a different screen mode too.  Middle-click the palette, go up to mode and select (or type in) 12.  If that doesn't help try 22 (IIRC that's ultra low res)

Oh, and Im running it on my amithlon box by the way (core2duo@3.86ghz/dual channel ddr2-1066/matrox g550/sb audigy).

2.9MHz equivalent was better than I was expecting!  Doesn't sound too usable though.

I'll see if I can fix the pointer flicker, I might be able to stop it updating quite so much.

[chris]

It boots up RiscOS but there is no mouse pointer, therefore I can't actually do anything with it :-(

You have the version I originally uploaded (which was broken), please re-download.