Legacy (26-bit) apps under RPCEmu

I’m about to go the way of all flesh and get a Mac. I believe RPCEmu will work on a Mac: will I also be able to run 26-bit apps such as Rhapsody and Eureka using the RPC port of RISC OS 5, or will I need a RO3 or RO4 ROM image?

You’ll need RO3/4 AFAIK – although perhaps Aemulor works under RO5 with RPCEmu.

With a wide variety of RISC OS machines now available, one has to wonder why you’d go for a closed platform like the Mac. Mind you, my experiences (which include credit card fraud) have been very negative on the Mac front. It just seems odd to buy a platform that actively discourages 3rd party environments when you’re a regular RISC OS user! Even VA for Mac has some limitations compared to the Windows edition (for example in networking/email etc). But obviously, it is your choice.

Anyway, I think Aemulor uses the specific features of the hardware in question, so wouldn’t be appropriate. However, RPCemu may work if you give it a suitable 26bit ROM image. However, whilst RPCemu is laudable, my own experiences have been that it pales in comparison to VA (with caveats about Mac usage as above).

Sorry to be a party pooper, and yes, I have lots of vested intrests, but I get a bit frustrated that various parties seem to actively encourage Mac usage, and my experience has been that unless you mainly use Apple products on the Mac, you’re out in the cold. This results in much less RISC OS-type usage following the Mac purchase, as compared with “other ways” of doing things :(

The other problem is printing, of course (and some issues of getting stuff onto the Mac, I’d imagine). This can be worked around, of course, but I’d imagine if you’re using Rhapsody, it is something that should at least be considered before purchase.

one has to wonder why you’d go for a closed platform like the Mac.

I think you are being a little premature about the Mac.

While there is no doubt that locking down the platform like they have with the iPad, will have crossed their minds, it isn’t anywhere near there yet.

With a standard Mac you can run virtual machines, or boot it up in Linux or Windows. You can also use lots of Unix programs.

The Mac has several similarities with RISC OS, drag and drop, application directories, the dock, image file system and out of the box it is a far sounder system than windows.

Thanks for the feedback: I’m not much clearer as to the difficulty or otherwise of running a RISC OS emulator on the Mac, TBH. If anyone out there has actually run either RPCEmu or VA on a Mac I’d like to hear from them. In the meantime the Mac section of the VA user forum is probably the place to go.

I use the RPCEmu a lot on the Mac but never bothered to get the network part working, looks to complicated. What I did was use FTP to access the mac from other RiscOS machines. As a mount point I used the HostFS part of the Mac disk.

For printing I use PrintPDF. Problem is that you have to remove the filetype (the ,xxx part) from the created file to access it. I solved this by installing Adobes Acrobat reader. This programs will load it on double click and print using the Mac’s printer.

I must say that the emulator is not 100% stable so you have to save your work regularly and you really should get a 3 button mouse.

“will I also be able to run 26-bit apps such as Rhapsody and Eureka using the RPC port of RISC OS 5, or will I need a RO3 or RO4 ROM image?”

I have a number of RPCEmu installs George, with different versions of RO on them, and no, an Emu running ROOL RO 5.nn will not work with things like Eureka etc.

You can get a copy of 4.02 variously or from Virtually Free from the RISC OS Ltd

Dave

Cheers, Dave, thanks for the feedback.

“I have a number of RPCEmu installs”: including on Mac OS, by any chance? I’m starting to think it might be easier to keep the Iyo on the network and run a Mac natively, i.e. purely as a Mac. This setup may not meet Her Indoors’ requirement for ‘a proper computer like everybody else has’ of course…

Sorry no, George.
I have a personal prejudice against anything Apple…

That aside, even though I’m quite serious about my RISC OS stuff :-) for work reasons, we must also have a Win PC available, so SWMBO here has the best of both worlds.

Dave