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Published on 18th Apr 2003, 18:32:22, source is drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

New RISC OS emulation, improved 8 bit emulation plus more

In the midst of the recent onslaught of re-introduced commercial titles, here's some cheerful free software for your RISC OS computer.

Emulate something your own size
home-1.worldonline.nl/~jandboer/

We're not normally fans of RISC OS emulation as we'd prefer you to actually buy and use RISC OS 4 and 5, however Jan de Boer's Archimedes emulator is an exception, we think. Released this month, Jan's software emulates an A310 computer (ARM 2 with original Acorn Archimedes chipset) and performs reasonably well on our StrongARM RiscPCs, the reported clock speed is 5MHz.

With no mention of any licencing, Jan has provided ROM images (naughty naughty, no supper for you) of Arthur, RISC OS 2 and RISC OS 3 so you can step through the early days of RISC OS. Unlike other free Acorn emulators available, Jan's app is very easy to get started with once you've flicked through the Help file. Watching RISC OS 3 boot up sure brought back memories of my first Acorn machine, an A5000. Another cute feature (really for hardware interested people) is the Control Window which lists realtime details and status registers of the emulated Acorn chipset. We like.

You Beeb, they Beeb, we all Beeb for BeebIt
homepages.paradise.net.nz/mjfoot/

What is this? Emulation hour? You've got your emulated A310 so now it's time to go 8 bit with Michael Foot's updated BBC B/B+/Master 128 computer emulator. Version 0.50 also works on the Castle Iyonix so you can "knock 20 years progress off the performance of your new machine in one swoop", as Mike put it to us.

According to the email we received this week from Mike, BeebIt now features new routines to render the video screen in 256 colour modes for Iyonix users, a cursor in teletext mode, a slight speed increase in the handling of interrupts, improved and reimplemented snapshots plus screen save can now save a teletext screen to a sprite - yay! Now we can screenshot Granny's Garden.

Scarey Python
www.schwertberger.dusnet.de/python.html

Here's a nod for Python users, developer Dietmar Schwertberger has released the first Alpha of Python 2.3 for RISC OS.

Director revisited
director.sf.net

Following the earlier 0.33 release, a stable release of the excellent all round RISC OS enhancer utility Director is now at version 0.34.

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