RPCEmu 0.9.3

On return to RPCEmu Alarm will have lost time and the seconds can be seen incrementing rapidly as if time is trying to catch up with itself.

Sounds like Jeffrey’s code to control the clock’s drift is at work here.

Sounds like Jeffrey’s code to control the clock’s drift is at work here.

The macOS build of RPCEmu 0.9.3 exhibits this problem at RISC OS 5.24 (although the window does have to be minimised for 5 minutes or more). Was Jeffrey’s code present in 5.24?

Was Jeffrey’s code present in 5.24?

RTC 0.02 contains the fixes I made to improve the drift correction. RISC OS 5.24 only contains RTC 0.01.

However, it’s important to note that the OS has contained code for correcting for clock drift since RISC OS 3.1 (where it was handled by the RTCAdjust module). And I believe all versions clamp the adjustment so that the clock speed is never more than 2% faster or slower than the default speed. So if time is advancing rapidly enough for it to be obvious within a second or two of looking at Alarm then that suggests the problem is elsewhere.

4) As soon as the mouse goes outside the bounds of the RPCEmu contents window and touches the Menubar – boom! The app closes instantly.

Thanks for the report Alan and Bryan. This has been tracked down and a fix will be in the next release. (Incidentally it was cross platform and would have been present since version 0.9.0 at least).

That’s brilliant to hear. Many thanks for investigating and fixing so quickly.

Thanks for this update Matthew and Peter, the instruction and CMOS fixes make a big difference to stability. Including the bundles is a great idea as well.

For any other Mac users out there who haven’t seen my post on the RPCEmu mailing list, I have created a Mac binary for 0.9.3. It can be downloaded here:

https://github.com/Septercius/rpcemu-dev/releases

This has been tested with OS X 10.13 and later (High Sierra, Mojave and Catalina).

Most people will want the “Release” file. Download the DMG or ZIP file and open it up. Inside you will find an application for both interpreter and recompiler builds, along with a “Data” folder that contains the support files like the CMOS file and the hard drive images. You will need to add an appropriate RISC OS ROM image to the “roms” folder.

When you run the emulator for the first time, it will ask you to tell it where this folder is located (it can be anywhere, e.g. in your “Documents” folder). Click on the “Select” button and navigate to the relevant folder and press “Open” (you have to select the folder itself, not the parent – so you rename the “Data” folder to “RPCEmu” and copy it to “Documents”, you need to choose “RPCEmu”, not “Documents”). You can bring this window back up on subsequent occasions by holding down the SHIFT key whilst the emulator is loading. The interpreter and recompiler builds are treated differently, so you can have different folders for each. If you want to back up the preferences files that contain this information, they can be found in “~/Library/Preferences”, with a name starting with “org.marutan.rpcemu” and an extension of “plist”).

Functionality-wise, the emulator same as the Linux/Windows versions, so you can set up networking to access the Internet using the guide on the main RPCEmu web site, and so on. The only difference is that the keyboard combination for exiting full-screen mode is Ctrl+Command (for the benefit of MacBook users who don’t have a dedicated “End” key).

Please feel free to raise any issues relating to the Mac support in the issues page – https://github.com/Septercius/rpcemu-dev/issues.

Sorry to post another bug, but here goes:

I use GCC for development using RPCemu, and I often get a warning message informing me that the final file has a modification time nn’s in the future, so the make command fails.

I’m not sure if it’s a RPCEmu bug or a RISC OS bug.

But if happens on both the Recompiler and Interpreter versions on Linux Mint 19.3.

Peter’s right, if I turn off the “reduce CPU load” option RO 3.71 quits correctly.

However, I have encountered another bug. Sometimes, if an app in RO (5.27) crashes in RPCEmu 0.9.2, and I go to the menu to do File>Reset, I get the dialog box as usual, but RPCEmu doesn’t reset, and if I then go to File>Exit, again I get the dialog box, click OK but RPCEmu doesn’t exit. To quit I have to click the close button, and then click “force quit” when I get the “application not responding” dialog. This is on Ubuntu, 18.04/GNOME.

I’ll try version 0.9.3 on the same setup and see if the problem still occurs there. P.S. What do I need to change to upgrade from 0.9.2 to 0.9.3? Is replacing the executable enough, or are there other files that need to be updated?

What do I need to change to upgrade from 0.9.2 to 0.9.3? Is replacing the executable enough, or are there other files that need to be updated?

In addition to updating the executable the ‘netroms’ folder needs to be added. I also updated the modules in ‘poduleroms’ and removed the ‘SyncClock’ module if present.

Sometimes, if an app in RO (5.27) crashes in RPCEmu 0.9.2, and I go to the menu to do File>Reset, I get the dialog box as usual, but RPCEmu doesn’t reset, and if I then go to File>Exit, again I get the dialog box, click OK but RPCEmu doesn’t exit.

Turning off the “reduce CPU load” option prevents that here.