Date   : Mon, 06 Jul 1998 10:04:17 +0100
From   : David Alan Gilbert <dg@...>
Subject: Re: Acorn Achemedes

Robert Schmidt wrote:

> On the emulators page of "The BBC Lives!" (http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc),
> three ARM emulators are listed.  I think you will find that we have
> still a year or so until Archimedes emulation becomes useful.
> 
> ArcEm 0.2 by David Alan Gilbert (of BeebEm fame) sounds like the most
> complete emulator, but it's probably still too slow for practical use.

:-) Well spotted! I only uploaded 0.2 last night and hadn't even got
round to announcing it! I don't think it does anything for speed; but it
does run on Linux/Alpha now; so if you happen to lay your hands on a 
nice new Alpha 21264 it might even be responsive :-))


> About reading Acorn discs - I don't have a clue.  I've forwarded this
> reply to the BBC micro mailing list, so can anybody of you guys help
> Dave?

There are two issues:

   1) BBC DFS discs - difficult these days, many PCs aren't physically
      capable of reading the sectors off signle density discs.


   2) ADFS discs, your PC can theoretically read these. The latest development
      versions of Linux come with the ability to read ADFS filesystems and
      partitioning (primarily for use on Linux/ARM running on Archimedes
      and RiscPCs) If you can work out how to use the floppy utils to get
      the drive to read the disc I'm reasonably confident that Linux could
      then read the files off.

Dave

P.S. The latest version of ArcEm has been run on a StrongARM running Linux/ARM
and has successfully emulated Linux/ARM booting....there is a strong possibility
that many other OSs should work as well.....

-- 
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