Retro 8bit emulators for RISC OS

hello,

A topic for the retrogamers !!!! 8bit inside !!! :)

I try to find the best emulators on RISC OS for :
ATARI 800
COMMODORE 64 (apparently Vice is no more supported)
MSX
SPECTRUM
AMSTRAD CPC

I have found this link but there are a lot (without comments), and lot of links are dead :
http://www.riscos.org/cgi-bin/linksdb?c=emulators

Is there a special website for this kind of emulator ?

Or could you please tell me (with your great experience) wich emulators are the best for a Rasp Pi runing with RISC OS (PICO if possible) ?

Thanks !

There are ports of a few emulators for RISC OS at:

http://www.riscos.info/packages/SectionIndex.html#Emulation

They should all run, but I’m not sure how you use them or how good they are.

Lock here for actually ports and thanks Chris. MSX (Mess) is also aviable but not in the list.

thanks (again and again)

Now me goal will be to create a “RISC OS RETRO” (with PICO & emulators)

Not sue but I mean most of them (or all?) need a gui. I have give a short try to start Mess outside of the desktop and I have the game sound but in a blank window.

oh god… I need to be less enthousiastic so…. LOL I was imagining that the emulators are running without GUI in full screen.

Do not give up. It was only a short test. Can also be that I have made ​​a mistake.
I have set a fullscreen mode in the Mess start obey but I became a blank window after start from CLI. If I start the same obey in the Wimp, it starts in fullscreen.

Do not give up. It was only a short test. Can also be that I have made ​​a mistake.
I have set a fullscreen mode in the Mess start obey but I became a blank window after start from CLI. If I start the same obey in the Wimp, it starts in fullscreen.

ok, I will try with 3 or 4 emulators, and tell you.

No success

when i try to launch for example the game SPEEDBALL, or VICE64 (emulator) I have this message :

“An application that loads a file of this type has not been found by the filer. Open a directory display containing the required appmication and try again”

does it means that it require GUI ????

(I have just copy the files into the SDCard without install)

For Vice64 you must set the filetyp of the diskimage to &164 and the Filer should know !Vice64.
Sorry, I not have “Pico”. I try with a “normal” RISC OS outsite of the Desktop (boot without it or the easy way open the Taskmanager, menu, Exit Desktop…). Vice I have also try. My error message was “Vice resources not found”.
There is probably still a bit of “research” needed.

does it means that it require GUI ????

Yes, sort of. The Filer (part of the GUI) handles the file associations and such.

Vice64 ought to be an application, like “!Vice64”. Go into that directory, and then try Obey !Boot and see if things work afterwards. To load the emulator, don’t run its executable, try Obey !Run instead. Sounds cumbersome, but this is what the filer does for you.

I can’t provide more info as the official version [http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/] does not provide a RISC OS binary any more (too outdated) and I’m cooking dinner so don’t have time to look for it.

it does not work… always problem or missing files, of missinf ressources… I think it is a bad idea to try to launch programs with RISC OC PICO :/

Best emulator for Amstrad CPC was CPCemu by Andreas Stroiczek (aka “Face Hugger of Moving Pixels” in the CPC scene). Unfortunately, it was never 32bitted let alone ARMv7ed. I talked to Andreas in 2009 about 32bitting it, and he was interested, but not sure if the interest is there.

Well, ever since RISC OS was born, it has been with the GUI environment as part of the package. And back in the early days of 1MB machines, some non-GUI software did horrible things to free up resources (the number of times something unplugged Econet was quite annoying), so fairly quickly people realised that working with the GUI was a better approach. It may also be used for a full-screen emulator to provide configuration options, or to run the emulation in a window if desired so everything else keeps on working alongside…

Yes, so I abandon my idea to do a retro basic OS environement with emulators.

I suppose it is possible, but for a RISC OS expert, not for a RISC newbie like me ;)

Thank you for all your help.

For my project (i Pi retro computer allinone) we have succesfull (my team) to boot direct on emulators with Iavery light Archi linux OS (in 5 or 7 sec). If somebody is interesting to do the same thing with RISC OS and participate to our project, then he can contact me.

I recently had an email exchange with Andreas Stroiczek and he agreed that open sourcing his CPC emulator would be a good idea. However, he is quite short on free time atm, so don’t hold your breath.

That would be fantastic. CPC is my second platform of choice. Anyway, the source is visible, as it’s a Basic file. But not ‘32bitified’.

We have many emulators (thanks Chris), but most of them are not referenced on line. That’s a shame, since RISC OS is really a fun platform, so – IMHO – a logical choice for emulation and homebrew games.

I may have the source code to another Amstrad CPC emulator, Mark Rison’s !CPC. Many, many years ago I was also porting !Joyce, the Amstrad PCW emulator, but I think it would be better to start from scratch on a new port now.

We still have a few tools for use with emulators on our web site

Andreas Stroiczek aka Face Hugger has released CPCEmu V1.21 along with the sources. If someone would like to have a go 32bitting/ARMv7ing/ARMv8ing it…

http://www.huggers-world.de/mops.html

I threw together a hacky 32 bit port. I’m saving CPSR around most of the PSG calls! but to be honest I don’t really understand the sound system so…

I wanted to convert the older (v1.10) release as the documentation says the more recent one is “unfinished”…how much is unfinished?

Aaanyway, I was stymied by the wodge of code “code/tie”. It’s some 30K compressed, and I don’t see any sources for it. Hmmm.

But not to be defeated, I put the converted modules into the later version and started it. It worked without anything being needed to be done to the application code. It is pretty crashy-crashy and unstable, I don’t know enough about the system setup to figure out why…
The megademo crashes. A fair few of the games on MY_PD don’t seem to respond to keypresses (unless they use weird keypresses?). There’s some stuff in German so I just rebooted the emulator as I have no idea what it said. Except I figured out “Farb- oder Gruenmonitor” was asking if the display was colour or mono green. ;-)

Right. So what works? The OS boots, obviously. ProText starts and loads various .doc files. Maxam starts. I’ve played The Space Duel (with myself). Speed alternates between 100% and 192% on a 700MHz Pi model B.

I’ve never used a CPC before, nor am I interested in doing so. This is just a “for the hell of it” way to waste an evening that I had nothing better to do. ;-)

There are no sources or anything – I’m using RISC OS today and there’s no SFTP client that supports public key authentication (that I know of). To hack your own, it’s the !modFDC22 and !modKBD08 and !modPSG23 modules I tweaked, as follows:

In the module header, add this to the header stuff that is there:

EQUD   0
EQUD   thirtytwo-moduleBase

A little further down, insert:

.thirtytwo
EQUD   1

After the SWI jump table, remove the ORRS line that returns setting V, replace with:

CMP    R0,#1<<31
CMNVC  R0,#1<<31
MOV    PC,R14

That’ll work on either 26 or 32.

Remove the ^ from any LDM with one. Likewise change MOVS to MOV. It might be worth searching for PC as some are conditional.

That’s about it for the FDC and KBD modules.

For the PSG module, I changed the flag hackery to disable interrupts to calling OS_IntOff and later OS_IntOn. Note that there is one more On than Off (it’s near the end).
Also, as we are restoring all registers and seemingly in the sound system, I figure it would be good to restore likewise the flags. So following the “stack everything”, I do this:

MRS    R1, CPSR
STMDB  R13!,{R1}

I know it’s bad form to use a STM for a single register, I just copy pasted from elsewhere in the module. Was easier than typing. ;-)

To restore flags, just prior to the “unstack everything”:

LDMIA  R13!,{R1}
MSR    CPSR_cxsf, R1

(purists might say CPSR_all, but that makes BASIC report a missing comma)

Actually, I do that in most parts of PSG that restore flags. Don’t know if I should still in 32 bit. Better to unnecessarily than fail to and need it.

That’s about it.

Have fun.