ArcEm for MacOS X

Welcome to the home page for the MacOS X port of ArcEm, the GPL Acorn Archimedes emulator. It looks like this (click on image for a full size version):

Another screen shot can be seen here.

This port is still being worked on, so there's not much here at the moment. You almost certainly want to visit the official ArcEm homepage, where you can find the current source (released under the GNU Public License) in CVS, thought be warned it's of in-development quality, ie should be considered shonky until further notice.

You can also get the latest alpha build here: arcem.dmg.gz. This is build 14, which supports mixed use of both ADFS 800K and DOS 720K disk images and fixes the restart emulation menu option. Please note that this is work in progress though, so should not be considered stable. Read the README file in order to set it up properly. You'll need to get your own ROM images to run with it too. You can extract ROM images from your RISC OS machine following the instructions in the manual, but this results in four image files, which you'll need to concatenate into one file. You can do this in Mac OS X by opening a terminal, moving to the appropriate directory containing the four ROM files, and run the command:

cat ROM1 ROM2 ROM3 ROM4 > ROM

This results in a single file called "ROM" being created, which is what ArcEm expects.

Rather unusually, ArcEm is being worked on at the moment. I'm currently testing support of hard disk images and for hostfs support (whereby you can mount a directory from the Mac as a disk under ArcEm). Updates will hopefully follow :)

For a blatantly biased view on why you'd want to use RISC OS, the OS that ye olde Archimedes runs, read the h2g2 entry here. Personally I don't quite see the reason for the obsession (they make Mac Zealots look like they're pacifists in comparison) that drives these people on, but each to their own ;)

More soon, honest.