RPCEmu on AArch64 Linux

Where are you looking? There’s some outdated stuff on GitHub, but it looks as if the sources are here: http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu and last updated three months ago.

Unfortunately platforms like OSX (Apple) have been quite unpopular with the RPCemu developers

Buy them a Mac then.

Where are you looking? There’s some outdated stuff on GitHub, but it looks as if the sources are here: http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu and last updated three months ago.

Who said that source drops are not available? Please do not confuse the issue, read what people have written in this thread. Source availability is not the problem.

If RPCemu is now owned by a company then that should be done properly as well as being made clear to the general public.

Far as I know it’s still Peter Howkins leading the project, same as it has been for as long as I can remember.

Source availability is not the problem

Then what is the problem? If you’re talking about the AArch64 Dynarec, then quoting Peter himself earlier in this thread:

I should probably mention we have a prototype AArch64 recompiler, whilst still in progress it does offer a significant performance increase over the interpreter. At some point it’ll be rolled into a future release of RPCEmu.

> is the AArch64 recompiler open source? I’d definitely would like to beta test that. (on M1)
Unfortunately not yet. Due to the previous behaviour of those in the RISC OS Market 1 we no longer feel able to publish work-in-progress code of certain features.

Surely it’s better for it to be finished before it’s released? I can empathise with Peter and the other contributors not wanting to have their work ripped off, or to wake up to a mountain of bug reports for an experimental feature. A dynamic recompiler is a tricky thing to get right, and releasing it early is just going to lead to complaints of crashes, data loss and what have you.

If anyone has changes, then there’s a mailing list to submit patches. A bunch of mailing-list-submitted patches have ended up merged into the mainline release, see the comments like “thanks to X for this” in the release notes…

As usual with this forum, it seems like someone’s got the wrong end of the stick, run with it, and snapped the end off in the process.

Not to mention, if somebody really wants to get involved then maybe it would be better to get in touch directly rather than complaining on a forum? 🤷

It’s a bit disappointing that there seems to be conspiracy nonsense going round. No company has purchased RPCemu, as I understand it it’s the exact opposite; development has “closed” in part because of concerns that some (*cough*cloverleaf*cough*) might try to profit from it.

If people aren’t happy with that, fork RPCemu and develop it your own way. That’s how the current branch started, after all.

Alternatively, as Rick say, try talking to the devs directly, or eg via the mailing list, rather than complaining over here.

I do boggle at this forum some times ….

No RPCEmu is not going commercial, no it has not been bought by a company, no it is not going closed-source, no it is not going to get loot boxes, no it is not going start serving adverts, no it is not going to sell your data to the highest bidder.

RPCEmu is free, as in zero cost, as in free to alter, as in free to contribute too. This is how I like it, this is how I intend to continue to provide it.

RPCEmu however is sold, not by me, but by other people within the RISC OS market. Do I like this? Not particularly. The people that have sold it have generally been very very bad at passing changes back ‘upstream’, and have certainly never shared any of the money. Is this legal? Completely, it is a right granted under the licence.

My personal view on this is “If you paid for RPCEmu, you were ripped off”.

RPCEmu is published under the GPL. It is not about to have the licence changed.

1. Changing the licence would need the agreement of every person who has contributed to RPCEmu. That is over 20 people.
2. Even if every other person agreed, I do not, I like the licence, so it will not be changed.

For the avoidance of any doubt RPCEmu (and any program that uses any code from RPCEmu) will remain under the GNU General Public Licence Version 2 (or later version of the GNU General Public licence).

The GPL gives you lots and lots of rights to things, but not to either of the following;

1. The right to force me to release anything that is not yet public. I am under no obligation to put things out that I know will cause me more hassle than working on them privately. I still get to work on things privately, regardless of how much you might want them. Until I release something you do not have any rights yet.
2. The right to have your code included in something that I publish. I always reserve the right to make choices about what I do and do not want to support. If I think something is a bad idea, or will cause me more work in the future, I get to pick and choose.

What can you do if you think either of the above is too much for you to bear?

1. Complain about it on the ROOL forums.
2. Take the entirety of the history of RPCEmu development, make as many changes as you like, keep it as private as you like, or if you choose to publish them, release them under the terms of the GPL.

On a practical note, what this thread has reminded me of is that the usual way for people to contribute or seek support for RPCEmu, the ‘RPCEmu mailing list’ is down. It appears now after several months that riscos.info is likely never returning to a working state. As such ….

An alternate place for development discussion and support has been set up up by the very friendly people on the ‘Stardot Forums’. This should hopefully bring back an obvious place to contribute to development again.

https://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewforum.php?f=90

Things get really complicated when people don’t read properly..

Over 2 years ago Peter says that there is a prototype AArch64 recompiler and I said I would love to beta test.

If that does not qualify as a request to partake in the development then so be it.

@Sarah: thank you for making it clear that development is now ‘closed’ and why that decision was made.

There is no conspiracy, just a lot of people failing to read complete sentences.

WTH?

RPCEmu is very much Open Source.

Not only that, but if I have a technical question Peter is ALWAYS available to help and provide info. Last time he helped me finding a lot of very good tech data on the StrongARM MMX instructions which I am using to HW accelereate my UltimaVM for the SA as well (so even helping with projects that are not his own).

Please stop this conspiracy nonsense. As other have already shared, the active repository is open to everyone.

Unfortunately platforms like OSX (Apple) have been quite unpopular with the RPCemu developers

I have done my own work to create my own version for the Apple Silicon, which I am using every time I can¹.

Pete cannot accept changes done for the Mac, because he has no way to test them, so, if you want, buy them a Mac.

¹ No, I am not distributing the Mac version, nor I have time to support users. There is apparently an official port for Mac, but I do not have the pointers to it, sorry.

Peter, I’d like to thank you unequivocally for producing what is without a brilliant piece of work, which has saved my bacon on more than one occasion and undoubtedly has helped to keep the OS alive.

@Sarah: thank you for making it clear that development is now ‘closed’ and why that decision was made.

Anyone can develop anything they like with the available source. It’s never operated as a fully crowd developed project so far as I’m aware, but people have gone off and developed their own branches.

Open Source != everyone gets to play with what any one person is doing with the source. You’re free to work on your own version if you so desire, and have other people co-develop on github, or not.

As @Andrew said above – it’s saved me many headaches on many occasions (particularly file transfer ones), and does exactly what it says on the tin: emulates a riscpc.

Could someone moderate this thread and move all the non AArch64 Linux related stuff into a ‘RPCEmu ’ thread? I don’t have a good suggestion for the name.

There were people here that wanted to discuss RPCemu on AArch64 Linux but that was 2 years ago.

The points people were making were directly relevant to the points that were raised in the thread. Removing them would remove all the context.