RPCEmu

 

Google

I have been in touch with Tom Walker, the author of the RISC OS Emulator RPCEmu and expressed my interest in porting the program to the Mac. He has given his approval and so I have made a start in getting RPCEmu to run under OS X. Initial findings are good and the program is now booting to the desktop and running software. There are still things which need tidying up so the software isn't ready for general release yet.

However, several people have been in touch and asked for a copy of the current software to play with.

I have therefore made a test version of the program available for download.

You can download it here (7543 KB).

The program uses a JIT compiler to convert Arm machine code to x86 code so will only work on Intel Mac's at the moment.

However, there is also code in RPCEmu to interpret the Arm processor so once this is working, the program will work on Power PC's as well (although slower).

I have now got the PPC code working and you can download it here (7476 KB). As expected, it does run rather slowly.

I haven't included any OS ROM images so you will have to provide your own.

If you don't have a three button mouse, the middle mouse menu button is on Alt-Command (or F14).

Ctrl-Alt-Command brings up a GUI menu to configure the program (or Ctrl-F14).

There is limited sound support at the moment.

Everything else I have tested seems to be working OK.

If the program doesn't work on your system or just simply crashes, can you please load the OSX Console application and run the program again.

Some debugging information will be displayed in the Console window and it may end up saying RPCEmu crashed (together with a disc location for the crash report).

If you can send me the contents of the console display and any crash report generated, this will help me investigate the problem further.

For further installation advice, please get in touch.

Revision History
Date Version Changes
19/08/07 xx.xx Added the RISC OS 4.xx Universal Boot Sequence to the hard disc image
CD-ROM support now works
Put F14 back in as additional menu key to Alt-Command key
Converted to statically linked libraries
Added printer support
The mouse menu button has moved from F14 to Alt-Command
The GUI menu has moved from Ctrl-F14 to Ctrl-Alt-Command
(These three keys can also be used to release the mouse)
Caps-Lock has moved from F13 back to the Caps-Lock key
13/08/07 xx.xx Initial Release

 

Pacmania

Home ] Up ]

Send mail to jon@g7jjf.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2006 Jon Welch
Last modified: 17-08-2010