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Hi All.

Is there a preferred BBC emulator for VRPC? I tried the version that worked with my Virtual A5000 - having kept that as it was and accessed it via a second hard disc pointing at the old instalation - it hung. Do I re-install in to the VRPC drive or get something else?


Ta.

From memory I don't think that !65Host works on RISC OS 4.

Instead have a look at Michael Foots !BeebIt

https://mjfoot.netlify.app/riscos.htm

Thanks for that.

I have downloaded it - wow isn't risc os small on the prog file size side???

reagrds, Simon

Yes, a lot of RISC OS programs are really tiny (when compared to similar progs on other systems). I know I always try and keep programs as small as possible and I guess others do to, it comes from spending years fitting big apps into machine with only a couple of Mb free memory.

I too am interested in Beeb emulation, but have a couple of problems.
!65Host works with Risc OS4 on my real SA Risc PC via a bit of patched code. However using it in this way on VRPC-Se starts up an emulation but the characters are all wrong.

e.g what would normally say Acorn ADFS V2 or whatever looks something like
Qjulgf hhjy kkk

or some gobbledegook or other. and pressing keys at the prompt produces the wrong character compared to what's on the key. I can send the code to someone to have a look at if anyone's interested, it means nothing to me I didn't write it.

Michael Foots beebit totally locks my VRPC-SE. It loads to the icon bar ok, but as soon as you click on the icon to run it VRPC-SE totally locks up and the only way out is to return to windows and reset. Any ideas anyone ?

Bad form to follow up my own post I know. But I've also tested 6502em. This appears to run ok. But when you run an app in it, it crashes - corrupts the screen, with a just legible risc os type error box saying 'printer not loaded'. It is not possible to do anything at this point, just press alt-break and then space-bar twice to return to RISC OS desktop

I've sorted it.

If anyone's interested it was as follows :

6502em - the easiest. Ensure your (configured) printer is sat on the icon bar in RISC OS before startting the emulator. It then works perfectly. However after quitting everything a print is sat in the windows print queue with the title Redsquirrel. My printer was turned off so I don't know what it looked like, I just deleted it, bit odd though.

Beebit. I commented out everything to do with OS 5 in the Run file (I guess this must be for RISC OS 5 - Iyonix use). However the emulation then displayed the same gobbledegook as !65Host (see earlier post).

!65Host
I discovered that the emulation worked, it was just the display that was corrupted. I fixed this by adding some more mode info (extra lines) into the VRPC-SE MDF. Well to be precise I made a copy of the MDF and worked on that. This then fixed the display for Beebit as well.

(Note that !65Host does not work 'out of the box'. You need to first patch it as for Strongarm, using !PCR13 and then insert a line in the run file calling a bit of code to patch it for RISC OS 4, I can give more details if anyone wants)

I've not had any more trouble with 6502em than I had on a RiscPC, but MODE 7 doesn't seem to be supported on VRPC. Could that explain some corrupted displays?

Mode 7 - yes possibly.

If you use my modified MDF (at your own risk of course) then you should be able to get all modes correctly displayed. Both under Beeb emulation and when playing games which use 'Old modes' in the desktop of VRPC-SE itself