Having finally realised that emulators may be the better way to go for day-to-day usage, I'm ploughing through setting RPCEmu and Arculator up with my software archives.
The only trouble is, these are extensive and are held in huge zip files. Hence, decompression and moving the resulting files between drives/filing systems takes many hours, even having configured the fastest machines I can. As a result, doing this in my spare time it's going to be quite a while before I can enjoy them.
Whilst I love the fact that these are accurate reproductions of the machines, and faithfully reproduce the experience of using a real machine, it would be nice to actually be able to get them into a position whereby I can appreciate them whilst I still have enough of my rapidly-dwindling marbles left to do so.
Without breaking the emulation, would be possible to add in an option that accelerates the entire machine by the same factor (CPU say 10x faster, all non-physical drives 10x faster, support chips 10x faster, etc)? In effect, a time accelerator so everything that normally occurs in a second at real-time is performed in, say 0.1s?
Arculator turbo option?
Re: Arculator turbo option?
Not the answer to your question, but - if you have one - the fastest way to run RiscOS is on a Raspberry Pi. ADFFS runs most of the old games, many apps now have 32-bit versions, or there's !Aemulor for those which don't. !ArchiEmu is a pretty decent emulator for running RiscOS 3.1 on RiscOS 5, if not quite as good as Arculator.
I have also used the Pi to do almost what you describe - unzip files and copy them to a CF card that acts as the IDEFS hard drive in my A3010 to save having to do it on the original hardware. I have successfully imaged that CF card and used it in Arculator, so you might be able to achieve what you are looking for that way.
Arculator is great because it's intended to be very accurate, hence it runs at original timings. Not sure if any of the other emulators run faster e.g. VA5000 (which can be found on Wocki's emulation site).
Like you, an almost complete lack of free time has curtailed my efforts to get everything up and running on an emulator or Pi - it remains my ambition, but work and small children mean it'll be a good few years yet.
I have also used the Pi to do almost what you describe - unzip files and copy them to a CF card that acts as the IDEFS hard drive in my A3010 to save having to do it on the original hardware. I have successfully imaged that CF card and used it in Arculator, so you might be able to achieve what you are looking for that way.
Arculator is great because it's intended to be very accurate, hence it runs at original timings. Not sure if any of the other emulators run faster e.g. VA5000 (which can be found on Wocki's emulation site).
Like you, an almost complete lack of free time has curtailed my efforts to get everything up and running on an emulator or Pi - it remains my ambition, but work and small children mean it'll be a good few years yet.
Re: Arculator turbo option?
I implemented pretty much this for my web version of Arculator. It disables graphics and sound while in "fast-forward" mode but everything else runs. I had to make a few tweaks to the code to keep the emulation running properly: viewtopic.php?p=387887#p387887
To port the changes back into main Arculator would be pretty easy, it would just need some UI enable and disable it. If there's interest I can put a pull request together.
To port the changes back into main Arculator would be pretty easy, it would just need some UI enable and disable it. If there's interest I can put a pull request together.
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NickLuvsRetro
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Re: Arculator turbo option?
I would definitely appreciate this! Writing code to be run on A3000 - A3010/A3020, at the moment I compile on RPCemu and then test on Arculator, but it would be nice to turbo just for the purpose of compiling directly on Arculator.
Re: Arculator turbo option?
I've got some work-in-progress code here: https://github.com/sarah-walker-pcem/ar ... bo-feature
When enabled, it runs about 10x faster for ARM2/ARM250 and 5x faster for ARM3. Currently it doesn't disable mouse or keyboard input while turbo mode is enabled. I should probably disable keyboard input at least because the keyboard becomes unable (i.e. you press a key and the input gets repeated 10 times). I also need to update the Windows front-end code (for now I only updated the Linux front end)
When enabled, it runs about 10x faster for ARM2/ARM250 and 5x faster for ARM3. Currently it doesn't disable mouse or keyboard input while turbo mode is enabled. I should probably disable keyboard input at least because the keyboard becomes unable (i.e. you press a key and the input gets repeated 10 times). I also need to update the Windows front-end code (for now I only updated the Linux front end)