ArcEm 1.00 Manual http://arcem.sf.net/
Follow the instructions appropriate for your system:
Download the src archive and follow the compilation instructions below. Once compiled copy the arcemrc file to your home directory as .arcemrc. When run there is some output on the console.
Extract the archive and supply a ROM image, the program is called ArcEm.exe. Create a shortcut to this file if you want to add it to your start menu or desktop.
Please see the !Help file within the !ArcEm application for usage information.
Note: Once installed all versions require a ROM image file.
Follow the instructions appropriate for your system:
The X windows version compiles up using the 'Makefile' contained in the root of the source package. If you have a big endian processor, such as Sparc or PowerPC edit the Makefile to add the -DHOST_BIGENDIAN flag to the CFLAGS field.
$ make
ArcEm will build under Cygwin. It builds a version which is independent of Cygwin (unlike the previous version of ArcEm for Windows), so you will also need to ensure you have mingw-runtime library installed (from Cygwin setup). Use the following command:
$ make SYSTEM=win
Additionally, ArcEm will build in Microsoft Visual C 6. Project files are provided for this in the 'vc' directory.
ArcEm builds with GCC. You should use the following command:
*make SYSTEM=riscos-single
It is possible to build with Leo White's RiscXLib if you really want to make an X Windows version under RISC OS, but that is beyond the scope of this guide. Finally, it is also possible to cross compile it using GCCSDK. e.g.:
$ CC=/home/riscos/cross/bin/gcc make SYSTEM=riscos-single
The desktop version of ArcEm has not been developed yet, and will not build.
As ArcEm is only a hardware emulator to make it do anything useful you need an operating system ROM. ArcEm has been tested with and is known to work with ARM Linux, RISC OS 3.10, RISC OS 3.11 and RISC OS 3.19. ARM Linux ROMs are freely available, check the website. RISC OS 3.1x ROMs can be extracted from a real Acorn machine using the following commands on RISC OS.
*save :0.$.ROM1 3800000 3880000 *save :0.$.ROM2 3880000 3900000 *save :0.$.ROM3 3900000 3980000 *save :0.$.ROM4 3980000 3a00000
Copy these files to your host operating system, RISC OS 3.1x supports DOS formatted floppy discs so you can use them to transfer the files. ArcEm needs the ROM file to be in one part (rather than the four you just created) so join them back together using the appropriate command for your system:
From a shell prompt:
$ cat ROM1 ROM2 ROM3 ROM4 > ROM
From a cmd.exe command prompt:
copy /b ROM1+ROM2+ROM3+ROM4 ROM
From the command line:
*print ROM1 { > ROM }
*print ROM2 { >> ROM }
*print ROM3 { >> ROM }
*print ROM4 { >> ROM }
You can download a copy of the RISC OS 3.10 ROM image as a support file from the !A310emu website, it's in the file support2.zip and is called ro310, you should rename ro310 to ROM before using it with ArcEm. Another good source is the 4corn Archive.
Some of the platforms require specific instructions to let you move the mouse around.
Whilst the Main display window has the focus, press the + key on the numeric keypad to 'capture' the mouse. To 'free' the mouse again for use with the rest of your X desktop press numeric keypad + again.
Although there is some mouse movement when you move the cursor over the display window, you can use the Unix/XWindows style numeric keypad + toggle to 'capture' and 'free' the mouse for better performance. Currently mouse handling on the Windows build is very poor.
The RISC OS version runs full-screen and captures all mouse input until you quit the program. Pressing the Escape key will quit ArcEm.
All the platforms support using .adf format floppy disc images. A disc image is a binary dump of the contents of a floppy disc. ArcEm has no support for directly using the host computers real floppy disc drive.
The basic support for floppy discs is to allow you to have the following floppy disc images in the current working directory of the ArcEm executable:
These are then available under RISC OS as the four disc drives ADFS:0 to ADFS:3. On Linux they are accessible as TODO.
Some platforms provide extra support for using floppy discs:
Whilst the control pane window has the focus, pressing 0, 1, 2 or 3 will eject/insert floppy disc images, those images still have to be named as above, but with moving of images around you should be able to change discs at run time.
ArcEm supports up to four Harddiscs, hard disc images are binary files that represent a hard drive's contents. ArcEm support the ST506 disc interface from Archimedes computers allowing it to support drives up to 64MB in size. Hard drive images should be placed in the current working directory of ArcEm and be named:
You also need to specify the hard drive "shape" in the arcemrc config file. The "shape" lists the number of Heads, Cylinders, Sectors and the Record Size, these four numbers multiplied together are equal to the size in bytes of the hard drive image.
When emulating RISC OS, you will also need to use the !Configure application to set the number of hard drives within the OS.
The arcemrc files stores information about the number and 'shape' of harddisc's attached to the emulated machine. Here is an example arcemrc:
MFM disc 1 1024 8 32 256 MFM disc 2 612 4 32 256
The five numbers represent the following:
For the premade hard drive images available on the website the shape information should be available. For your own harddiscs that you have imaged you should check the Harddrive itself, as the number of cylinders, sectors and heads is normally printed on it.