Peter and Matthew Howkins have released a new version of their open source emulator, RPCEmu. The software provides an emulation of classic Acorn systems, such as the RiscPC (hence the name) and the A7000, and versions are available for a number of platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Version 0.8.14 of the software includes the following changes:
- The cmos.ram file distributed with RPCEmu now has the bits reflecting unplugged modules cleared. This allows RISC OS Select releases 4i2 to 6i1 (versions 6.06 to 6.20) to boot “out of the box” – but if the upgrade is applied to an existing installation, it is necessary to use the included cmos.ram file and apply your own changes afterwards.
- Support has been added for 8MB of Video RAM on RISC OS versions 3.50, 3.60, 3.70, 3.71, 4.04, 4.29, 4.33, 4.37, 4.39 and 6.02, all via patching. This is in addition to the support for RISC OS 4.02 (also via patching), and RISC OS 5.2x and 6.10 to 6.20 (via OS auto-detection).
- Going the other way (part 1), video data can now be stored in any part of SIMM 0, Bank 0 of RAM – which means RISC OS 5.2x will now work with no Video RAM.
- Going the other way (part 2), TLB (“translation look-aside buffer”) entries for Video RAM are no longer created when none is configured – which means RISC OS Select releases 4i2 to 6i1 (versions 6.06 to 6.20) will also now work with no Video RAM.
- Thanks to a code contribution from Alan Buckley, certain characters that might appear in RISC OS path names that would be invalid on Windows are now translated in HostFS. Specifically, the same translations are now applied to ? < and > as that are with LanMan.
A final note of warning given with the update is that using the Windows installer to upgrade from previous versions may cause your cmos.ram and rpc.cfg files to be overwritten.