ArcEm 1.50 released

[tlsa]

ArcEm 1.50 has just been released.

ArcEm homepage: http://arcem.sourceforge.net/
ArcEm 1.50 manual: http://arcem.sourceforge.net/manual/arcem-1.50.html
ArcEm change log: http://arcem.sourceforge.net/changelog.html

[Zarchos]

On 2 PCs I installed ArcEm 1.50 and well it does work well except I don't have any sound.
Both run Windows Vista 32 bit.
Any advice on what I should do ?
Thanks a lot in advance.

[cliffh]

I just got my Raspberry Pi B out to do some C++ programming, but I’ve been sidetracked by ArcEm for the moment.

What a beautiful emulator this is! To me there is something particularly satisfying about emulating one classic ARM/RISC OS machine on another.

Actually, I first had a look at this over a year ago, but things didn’t go so well. I was running RISC OS 5.19 and had all sorts of intermittent keyboard and mouse problems. Now I’m running RISC OS 5.21 and everything is fine. Nothing else has changed, so I assume the earlier version had bugs in its USB drivers.

Most games run well in full screen mode. I just had to add “—noaspect” to the <ArcEm$Dir>.arcem command in the !Run file to avoid letter boxing.

StarFighter

I was experimenting with Desktop C release 4 on my A3000 recently, and this runs perfectly on ArcEm too.

Desktop C, Release 4

I was initially confused by the make tool’s refusal to recompile modified source files, but the problem was that ArcEm had not picked up the date properly (so it thought that the object files all post-dated their associated source files, hence didn’t need rebuilding). Setting the correct date and deleting the object files got everything back to normal.

Thanks for your original post tlsa. I find ArcEm a real pleasure to use.

Best Regards

Cliff

[Zarchos]

Wooowww what a great news !
If the issue of the mouse movements has been solved, I'll be able to use it on my laptop PC when programming in the train ...
What a good day today !


OK I see the original post is from 2012 so still no solution for me as on my EeePc the mouse in RISC OS ArcEm doesn't work properly ...

[steve3000]

I was running RISC OS 5.19 and had all sorts of intermittent keyboard and mouse problems. Now I’m running RISC OS 5.21 and everything is fine. Nothing else has changed, so I assume the earlier version had bugs in its USB drivers.

I haven't been following developments on RO5 on the Pi recently, but if the USB issues have been resolved, that would be great.

I'll need to check the version of RO5 that my Pi has - although I haven't tried ArcEm on the Pi, the USB issues I saw when testing !ADFFS seemed to happen on games which required fast, repeated key presses (so most games...!). The keyboard would sometimes pause temporarily, as would the mouse, which was frustrating - but the worst issue was the occasional permanent keyboard/mouse freezes, which needing the Pi to be restarted before the keyboard/mouse would 'wake up' - those were very annoying...

Some folk on the ROOL forums reported success using different keyboards/mice and a powered USB hub to help avoid these issues. But there were also reports that the USB issues were a result of IRQ latency on the USB stack, with missed interrupts causing the handler to crash. I understand this was also seen on some early Linux distros for the Pi, but the Linux handler was rewritten to use FIQs, which solved it...

[steve3000]

...so still no solution for me as on my EeePc the mouse in RISC OS ArcEm doesn't work properly ...

I get mouse problems with ArcEm on my windows Laptop. If I plug a 'real' mouse in it works fine, but if I use the built-in pointer 'button' or track pad, then ArcEm doesn't follow it properly, making it virtually unusable.

I did think about loading a RISC OS module in ArcEm, to emulate the mouse through key presses (like on the A4). I might have a look at that again some time...

[Zarchos]

Oooh so eventually this might be a very good day.

I remember now I had plugged a 3 button mouse but it didn't work ... I'll try again with some other mice I've got in case it has an influence on a laptop PC, who knows ... I don't know how ArcEm reads the mouse movements on a PC.
I thought it was reading what Windows reports, but who knows it could do sthing different and the quality of the hardware of the mouse could be the culprit ?


Thanks for the info, Phoenix !

[cliffh]

I haven't been following developments on RO5 on the Pi B recently, but if the USB issues have been resolved, that would be great.

As far as I can tell from my limited testing they have been resolved completely, but I would be interested to hear if others have the same impression.

For the record, here's what I've tried:

I'm using a wired keyboard (Logitech K200) and Microsoft mouse, both plugged straight into the Pi B with no powered hub or other add-ons, and a 1280 x 1024 monitor.

I've played a few games of Populous (my favourite Arc game) which involves some frenetic mouse activity, and these all went fine.

StarFighter 3000 and Mad Professor Mariarti both run. The keyboard controls appear to work OK to me. I certainly haven't experienced any freezes, dropped keyboard or pauses, but I admit that I have very little idea how to play these games, so it is possible that subtle performance issues like very short delays in key responses may have escaped my notice.

Elite runs, but even with the mouse on its slowest settings it's hard to control (probably not an ArcEm issue, because the mouse is perfectly usable in other applications).

James Pond suffers some graphics corruption, and Maddingly Hall crashes (which is no great loss because I never did manage to get my suitcase back from the butler in time to change for dinner).

I've been able to return cleanly to RISC OS 5.21 after every session using <alt><break>. This was rarely possible with RISC OS 5.19 because it usually dropped the keyboard sometime during the session.