riscos4 [2]

A port of Virtual Acorn's popular commercial RiscPC emuator has been in the works for a good few years now, with it being displayed at countless shows and user group meetings but no actual product to buy. That all changed at Wakefield 2007 when Aaron Timbrell of Virtual Acorn announced the release of a Beta version of Virtual RiscPC for PowerPC Macintosh computers, the beta can be bought from Virtual Acorn's website: http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk [3].

Intel Macintosh users who have been eagerly awaiting a Mac port were dissapointed due to the beta not being able to run on the latest Intel Macs. I'm positive that this will be fixed in later versions of the Mac port.

The current Beta of Mac Virtual RiscPC is not complete and only gives you a taster of what the complete version will be like. If you are looking for stability rather than 'something new', do not buy Virtual RiscPC for your Mac yet, stick with RPCemu until the final version is released.

The only flavour of Virtual RiscPC for MacOS is Adjust SA which is currently the latest and greatest version on all platforms and includes support for the recently released Select 4i2 (RISC OS [4] 6).

Sticking with emulator news, Thomas Walker of Arculator fame has updated his marvellous Arculator and RPCemu emulators for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Linux. Arculator is now at version 0.9a which temporarily removes FDI support for licensing reasons.The most notable update in RPCemu 0.7 is a new dynamic recompiler CPU core, RISC OS 4 now works properly with lazy task swapping on recompiler, a new DOS port and a long awaited CD-ROM support for Windows and Linux however Mac users can access ISO images from the emulator.