Emulator networking

I’ve got most of the networking in RPCEmu going. However, ping always fails (100% packet loss). I’m using Windows 7 x64 with all the bridge setup etc on that side, and everything in OS 5 setup too. I’m trying with the Firewall, but that makes no difference.

Any ideas why ping in OS 5 should be failing ?

I haven’t got any networking working in RPCEmu. Unlike VirtualAcorn, which works fine (as long as you don’t change the number of network adapters, but that’s another story).

I use RPCEmu089 on a Win7/64 platform and networking is fine under RO4.02, and, I believe, also under RO5.19: see

http://www.riscos.info/pipermail/rpcemu/2012-April/001695.html

though I can’t vouch for this personally.

Thanks for that – seems networking is really a bit hit and miss :)

Don’t despair: RPCEmu is well worth persevering with if you want/have to run RISC OS under emulation. It is free, is still being developed and on a fast system will comfortably outperform any native hardware short of a Pandaboard, Beagleboard and (possibly) the Raspberry Pi. Re networking, one option is to run both RO4.02 and 5, as I do, as separate installations, which can be run concurrently. Networking on the 4.02 side seems very stable (providing you follow the setup instructions to the letter), and you can make RO 5’s Hostfs directory visible to the network, so file transfer within RISC OS is straightforward. Any 26-bit software you have or need will of course run under 4.02, however RO 5, being fully 32-bit, runs about 25% faster under emulation than RO 4.02. Support is available via this site or the RPCEmu Archive referred to above.

I recently installed RPCEmu 0.8.9 on a Windows 7 Ultimate/64bit machine and on a Windows XP Pro/32bit machine.

While networking is OK on the XP machine (with the documented glitch that sometimes the recreation of the bridge is necessary), I cannot get networking running on the Windows 7 machine. Neither with RO 5.19 nor with RO 4.02. Ping does not work. However, using ShareFS, sometimes drives show up randomly, but they cannot be accessed. So something wrt networking seems to work, but not enough.

The networking support of Virtual-RPC “just works” on all machines without installing bridges and tunnels and virtual adapters and whatnot. But: still waiting for the new registration key for the new Win7 machine – 2 days and counting…I really really hate that brain dead “protection” system.

What I really miss in RPCEmu is the flexibility of the HostFS stuff in Virtual-RPC. Creating mounts pointing to any Host filing system path you like, the automatic drive popup stuff for removable drives…

VirtualRPC is undoubtedly a polished and effective product offering features not possessed by RPCEmu, but since the latter does everything I need an emulator to do, including reliable networking (on my system, at any rate), I don’t see the need to change. In addition, I can install RPCEmu anytime on any machine and run multiple copies/OS versions on the same machine. Finally, I can run RO 5, the only 32-bit version.
Season’s greetings to all and thanks to ROOL for all their good work!

Unfortunately, I found RO 5 networking very unreliable with RPCEmu (0.8.9) on my Debian box. I was more or less forced to use RPCEmu for a while a couple of months ago, when my Iyonix had another bout of PSU problems, and all AntiSpam mail fetches produced considerably corrupted downloads or crashed with nonsensical, inconsistent errors on RO 5.19. Using RO 4.39 everything worked fine.

I haven’t had the time to investigate this yet, but frankly I wouldn’t really know where to start either, as I don’t have any problems with RO 5 on my Iyonix.

And considering there hasn’t been an update for a year, I doubt it’ll be fixed…

There is still regular activity, just no new release. You can follow it via the Mercurial web interface.

Steffen wrote:

The networking support of Virtual-RPC “just works” on all machines without installing bridges and tunnels and virtual adapters and whatnot.

Agreed. I haven’t tried all the RPCEmu faffing because It Shouldn’t Work Like That.

What I really miss in RPCEmu is the flexibility of the HostFS stuff in Virtual-RPC. Creating mounts pointing to any Host filing system path you like, the automatic drive popup stuff for removable drives…

Absolutely, and really useful when used in conjunction with Google Drive. However, multiple HostFS mounts at least would be very easy to add to RPCEmu. The HostFS printer support would also be invaluable.

I dont really follow the emulator activity – too busy :)

Would like to get Virtual RPC at some point, although my Raspberry Pi has arrived. Just need to get an SD card now!