22nd May 2007
Full CD-ROM support has been added. RPCemu can access .ISO images on any platform, plus CD drives through IOCTL on Windows. There are a couple of bugs in audio playback, but mostly it seems okay.

12th May 2007
The recompiler has now become an actual dynamic recompiler (instead of a threaded interpreter). As such there are some major speed improvements :


Current benchmarks suggest RPCemu is running at around the speed of a 202mhz SA RiscPC, sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower.

22nd April 2007
There's been a fair bit of progress on the recompiler in the last month.

The recompiler now runs at twice the speed of the interpreter on my machine.


Quake is now dangerously close to being playable now, and you can play it properly if you're in a good mood. Benchmarks suggest Quake runs at about 75% of the speed it runs on a 202mhz StrongARM.


Fixes to abort handling means that RISC OS 4 now works on the recompiler, as well as the interpreter in StrongARM mode. Lazy task swapping doesn't work on the recompiler yet, though.

27th March 2007
Beginnings of dynamic recompiler for RPCemu, already some speed increases!

Fishtank2 now runs much faster than before. So far RPCemu has what is actually called a threaded interpreter, which is essentially the first step in a full dynamic recompiling emulator.


!Fquake runs better as well. All tests so far suggest that RPCemu is now running at half the speed of a StrongARM, and at least twice as fast as an ARM710.


!SICK also claims that RPCemu is a 120mhz StrongARM.

31st January 2007
A productive morning of debugging has fixed a bug in LDRT, having the side effect of allowing Bug Hunter to work in Arculator (should make some people happy - not me though, can't stand Bug Hunter). This might fix other programs written using ABC that didn't work before (I'm not aware of any, but you never know).

14th November 2006
Various bug fixes now allow FPA emulation to be used.


As the above !SICK results show, using the FPA emulation is over 100 times faster than FPE for floating point stuff. This is helped by the fact that, unlike a real FPA, RPCemu emulates all the instructions that were removed from the chip and are emulated on a real FPA equipped machine.

It's not perfect though, while Whetstone and things like !Draw work fine, !AMPlayer outputs noise instead of music.

3rd November 2006
The next release of RPCemu is shaping up nicely. Some bugs have been fixed, allowing more stuff like Ankh, Blu, Era, K2 and Reactivity to run :


Sound has been much improved, and most stuff now sounds perfect on my machine. There have also been more optimisations (from 70k->80k Dhrystones in !SICK, and a 25% boost in !FreeDOOM), and RPCemu can now take some advantage of dual core and multithreaded CPUs, by offloading the final blit from memory to video. This gives a performance boost of up to 100% in graphic intensive high res programs.

11th October 2006
Quite a while since the last update! Arculator v0.8 should be out soon, here are some screenshots of changes.

ARM timing has been changed to better match the real ARM2 (and hopefully by extension ARM250 and ARM3). This includes the performance penalty of VIDC screen refresh. This helps some games, such as Zarch and Enter The Realm, which no longer flicker as in older versions :


MEMC emulation has been improved by the emulation of all page sizes. This allows all possible RAM configurations to be emulated all the way down to 512k :


FDI support has been improved, now more copy protected games work, such as Stunt Racer 2000 :


Finally, support for multiple ROM sets (and multiple CMOS files) has been added, so that Arthur, ROS2 and ROS3 can be easily switched between, and CMOS settings are less likely to be corrupted by accident :

Click here for older WIP