Emulation software developer VirtualAcorn revealed today that it has bagged its 3000th registered user. The maker of VirtualRiscPC and the discontinued VirtualA5000 is also celebrating its 4th birthday, according to an announcement this afternoon.The size of VA's customer base is usually a closely guarded secret, fuelling the debate on whether or not sales of emulated hardware eclipse the number of native hardware products shifted. Although, it's known that, at least according to VirtualAcorn, VA5000 was retired after selling "thousands of copies" and it's likely that these sales contributed to today's figure of 3000.
To put this number into context, as far as we're aware, around 4000 copies of RISC OS 4 on ROM, over 2000 PS2MouseMinis and over 1000 NET100 ethernet cards have been shifted over the course of the past 5 years. These sales figures, whilst often seen as gossip or confidential secrets, are useful in gauging the size of the RISC OS market.
To celebrate their birthday, VirtualAcorn are running a special offer on VirtualRiscPC-SE from August 22nd to 26th.
Update at 19:27 19/8/2005
VirtualAcorn has added that the 3000 number is not the total number of products that they have sold - it's the number of registered users in their database.
"The figure includes all VirtualRPC-SE and VirtualRPC-Adjust's sold by us directly, but it doesn't include MicroDigital Alpha's," said VA's Aaron Timbrell.
"The figure also includes some VirtualA5000 sales, although in many cases the same user also has a VirtualRPC, and would only appear once in the database. Also dealer sales of VirtualA5000 aren't included and neither are show sales, unless the customer sent us their details and asked to be out on the database."
Links
VirtualAcorn website