Arculator v2.2 released!

[SarahWalker]

Arculator v2.2 is now available. Changes from v2.1 :

• New podules: Acorn AEH50 Ethernet II, Acorn AEH54 Ethernet III, Acorn AKA32 SCSI Podule, Design IT Ethernet 200, Morley A3000 User and Analogue Port, Risc Developments High Density Floppy Controller
• Support for HFE v3 and SCP disc images
• Integrated debugger
• Optimisations
• Bugfixes

As always, it's available at http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/index.html.

[kieranhj]

Fantastic work, as ever Sarah! Thanks for the new roll up release, I know you've been working on a lot of new features for a while.

[Arcadian]

Thanks Sarah for this, especially happy about the HFE and SCP support

[IanJeffray]

Another release of Arculator is always welcomed but the quiet addition of *** NETWORKING *** in to this seems like a massive deal to me. I'm amazed at all the podule support in Arculator now (PC podule and Colourcard also being amazingly impressive to me) but "it just works" networking, with no faff or anything else to install is just amazing. The fact Ether3's emulated should mean RISCiX networking would work I guess - not tried it - but ShareFS working is just so very cool - hassle-free file exchange with real machines. Wow. Amazing work.

[NickLuvsRetro]

Absolutely brilliant release, thank you Sarah!

Currently playing around with the debugger which is proving useful. I found some commands (by chance just typing things) but is there a list on the site or should I just peek at the sources?

EDIT - Ah! h/H for "Help", obviously.

[SarahWalker]

"?" is your friend.

[SarahWalker]

Thanks Sarah for this, especially happy about the HFE and SCP support

Might be some confusion - HFE was present in v2.1. v2.2 adds HFE v3, which is required for Inferno, Overload and Burn 'Out. You can probably spot a connection there

[garfield]

Arculator v2.2 is now available.

As always, it's available at http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/index.html.

Well done!

[DavidLowe]

Another release of Arculator is always welcomed but the quiet addition of *** NETWORKING *** in to this seems like a massive deal to me. I'm amazed at all the podule support in Arculator now (PC podule and Colourcard also being amazingly impressive to me) but "it just works" networking, with no faff or anything else to install is just amazing. The fact Ether3's emulated should mean RISCiX networking would work I guess - not tried it - but ShareFS working is just so very cool - hassle-free file exchange with real machines. Wow. Amazing work.

I’m guessing this should also mean it’s possible to talk to an Econet Pi bridge over AUN… ?

[philpem]

Thanks again for your hard work, Sarah!

I know we've talked about this on Discord earlier, I'm just posting this here for archival (Discord ain't the greatest for finding old threads).

Thanks for adding HFE v3 support!

With one small patch, you can use it to play The Crystal Rainforest and other Sherston games:

Code: Select all

In src/disc_hfe.c, find the function "process_v3_track", then look for this line:

                case HFE_V3_OPCODE_RAND:
                /*Not currently implemented, just add a byte of zeroes*/
                wp += 8;
                break;

Change it to look like:

                case HFE_V3_OPCODE_RAND:
/* HFE v3 request for a random byte - used for weak bit / weak sector emulation e.g. Sherston titles */
mfm->track_data[side][wp >> 3] = rand() & 0xFF;
                wp += 8;
                break;

I'm sure someone will chime in to say "but Sherston weren't the only publishing house who used weak bits/sectors" ... no, but they're the one who were most notorious for using them on the Acorn RISC platform!

Thanks also to Scarybeasts for the wonderful writeup covering the BBC version of Sherston's protection scheme: https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com ... ction.html

[sirbod]

Sarah, if it's any use to you, I've posted an updated Oak SCSI ROM here, which is the last available version with a few issues I've resolved.

[garfield]

Time for a stupid question:

Should HOSTFS work with Risc OS 2 ?

[SarahWalker]

No. RO3 only.

[garfield]

No. RO3 only.

Right. Thanks for the clarification.

[pixelblip]

Well done Sarah.......everyone is lucky to have such talented people at Stardot doing their own thing

[Sophira]

No. RO3 only.

Right. Thanks for the clarification.

BTW, in case you're curious about the reasoning (although I'm not Sarah so I can't speak authoritatively on this), I'm pretty sure it's because the ability to transparently implement image filing systems (ie. to implement arbitrary filing systems without having to worry about doing all the disc access yourself, and to have the result work like a native filing system) was only implemented from RISC OS 3 onwards.

(There were of course file-backed filing systems before then (Spark and ArcFS come to mind) but they had to use non-standard methods; Spark didn't use standard Filer windows and couldn't run applications without decompressing them first, while ArcFS was much better and allowed running programs in archives, but - as I understand it - worked by pretending it was a network filing system instead, resulting in a file path like "arcfs#Archive.$" which you were unable to *Dir to and could only use via Filer windows.)

It's probably theoretically possible to write HostFS for RISC OS 2, but it'd be more difficult both to develop and to use.

[Sophira]

And belated congratulations on the release, Sarah! Give yourself a well-earned break. Thank you for everything you're doing.

[garfield]

It's probably theoretically possible to write HostFS for RISC OS 2, but it'd be more difficult both to develop and to use.

Good explanation, thanks to you. I guess if one was to programme code for Arthur / RISC OS 2 ... you would simply develop against RISC OS 3 (i.e. to benefit from th HOSTFS transferability) and then test the code separately by rebooting into Arthur / RISC OS 2 with an appropriate ADF disc image.

[derek]

Hi,

I have compiled Arculator 2.2 on a Linux Mint 21.1 computer without any problems.

Very nice piece of programming.

[sirbod]

Not sure if its just me, but when renaming a configuration under v2.2 the CMOS file doesn't appear to be renamed to match, resulting in a blank CMOS the next time the machine is started.

[davehill]

Nice job with Arculator. I haven't used it before, but set it up last night and configured the networking. Works well. Very impressed.

[dr_d_gee]

I notice that in Arculator, what you get when you press the keys on a PC keyboard isn't always what you'd expect. In particular, shift-2 gives an @ sign, not a double quote. The £ symbol is not available, but the ~/# key duplicates the \| key.

I realise that this mimics the actual Archimedes keyboard, but it would be nice if, in a future version, you could implement the option of a "logical" keyboard layout much as BeebEm does.

Note that KeyboardMapper does not work on RO 3.11.

[garfield]

Arculator v2.2 is now available.

Apropos of nothing... I noticed this bug while using the game CONQUEROR :

The tank controls ( key H to move left tank track forward and key K to move right tank track forward ) do not work if using ARTHUR 1.20. Certain other keys do work, though, which suggests that emulation is just slightly "off" in this regard.

I know the workaround answer would be to use RISC OS 3 or 2... (where the H and K keys work correctly) ... but I was hoping that Arthur support would be improved if possible to make the original authentic experience doable. Any idea of what might have caused this key input trouble?

[sirbod]

I thought I'd give the debugger a try whilst investigating a game issue. Although it was very useful, it was also frustrating as some of the things I needed to do aren't available.

Here's some of the things I could have done with, that would have made debugging a lot easier/quicker:

• Skip an instruction. ie don't execute it, just skip over it
• Jump to an address. ie set the PC
• Continue to an address. ie run until the PC hits the address. Although this can be done with breakpoints, constantly adding and removing them is time consuming when you need to do it a lot
• Set ARM register values
• Alter the ARM PSR (I needed to enable IRQ/FIQ)
• Be able to "break" whilst in the debugger window when code is running (pressing a key for example). Having to switch back to the app to select "Break" from the debug menu is not ideal
• Be able to use the debugger whilst code is running. Several times I wanted to dump memory whilst the game was running
• Show ARM / IOC / VIDC registers in a separate window. This would be a real time-saver allowing you to watch the registers in real-time
• Be able to skip all OS code. When you're debugging an app in appspace via the step debugging, having to step into every SWI and step through every IRQ/FIQ is very time consuming, if you're not interested in them. In my case there was an IRQ storm going on and I wanted to see where the PC was in appspace. After 2hrs of holding ENTER to "s 1", I had to give up.
• Keep the command history in the command window. Quite often when step-debugging you want to hold ENTER and watch the instruction address, looking for PC jumps. When the command history is mixed in with the instruction history its really hard to see when a jump occurs when you're holding ENTER to step-debug