32-bit acorn emulators • Re: Do any Archimedes emulators have debug tools?

It's also worth noting that I have tested Arculator's inbuild debugger and raised a list of additions it really needs to workaround problems caused by IRQ / SWI etc.

I was after the Red Squirrel source for a couple of reasons:

1. To fix some serious bugs (mode changes triggering EXE crashes for example)
2. Add debugging output for IOMD

This is just a theory, but looking at the way both emulators are packaged Virtual Acorn and Red Squirrel are the same, so I suspect that's under ownership of 3QD. Then again there maybe some non-exclusive licensing going on.

Which is a shame, since Virtual Acorn now appears unmaintained, especially on the Mac side of things where it’s still a 32-bit Intel binary; a format up-to-date Macs ceased to be able to run five years ago.

Yeah, I think the best bet is Sarah's emulator (Arculator) as she's still adding to that. Only issue I've found is the JIT isn't quite as fast as Graeme Barnes's. But then I started coding a binary translation emulator for DOS a while back and I know how hard it is to get the emulation quick (and resonably accurate), I was scuppered by trying to keep in 'big memory' mode and the emulation needing quite a bit of memory for caching translated instructions. Which I came to the conclusion I probably needed to flip the x86 CPU in to 32-bit mode and have access to more and execute natively (rather than copying stuff back and forth), the way I was currently doing it was resulting in lots of caching issues on the x86 CPU as it didn't like executing new code from the same area as old code. I also had some trouble getting carry handling right as ARM does carry in an odd way (carry is heavily abused throughout RISC OS 2-3).


Found this in the VA binary which confirms it's Red Squirrel repackaged;
This is RedSquirrel version 0.6.1
(C) Copyright Graeme Barnes, 2002

Statistics: Posted by qUE — Mon Jul 15, 2024 10:50 am

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