For the purpose of this article, I have used the 'Red Squirrel' emulator - there are several others out there which run under Linux/Unix and Windows, but Red Squirrel seems to be the most advanced (forming the basis of the commercial Virtual Acorn package), and also has the distinction of being the only emulator (as far as I know) that allows you to emulate a RiscPC - meaning you get to play with Risc OS 3.7. This is the version of RISC OS I will also be emulating - you will need to adjust things slightly if you are attempting an older release such as the 'classic' RISC OS 3.1 or older. The only drawback I have discovered so far with this emulator is that it does not support networking - even though the host OS may offer a TCP stack, you won't be able to connect to any networks. If this is critical importance, it may be worth considering Virtual Acorn, as it has a downloadable networking plugin available.
Once you have unpacked the emulator, you will be left with a directory called 'RedSquirrel Release'.
Inside this, you will find a subdirectory called 'Romsets'. This is where the
system ROM images are stored for each model of emulated Acorn. You will find
inside 3 other folders - put your 4 ROM images into the one labeled 'RISC OS370'.
As long as you have the ROM files saved in alphabetical order, this is all you
need to do (you don't need to concatenate them into one big file, for instance).
You should be ready to start the emulator now - run the 'RedSquirrel.exe' file, and you will see a splash screen which you can safely ignore, and then you will be shown a dialog where you can pick the type of machine to emulate. Again, for this article, we will be emulating a RiscPC - so choose 'Risc PC SA,Risc OS 3.7'. The emulator will now start, and you should see a Window with the emulated system inside it. The first time you run the emulator, this may take a while, so be patient. Eventually, you will see a black screen and some white text. Because there are no system files on the emulated hard drive, below this, you will get an error message saying 'Error: File ':0.!boot' not found (Error number &D6)'. Ignore this, and at the * prompt, type in 'desktop' and hit enter. You will then see the RISC OS GUI environment appear :-
Because we haven't yet installed the support files for RISC OS, the system is
very basic, and won't do much beyond run the applications stored in ROM. The
screen mode is also very limited and can't be changed, so the fonts also will
appear distorted as seen in the screenshot above. Nonetheless, you can still
have a play with the system as it stands - try running some of the surprisingly
useful applications from the 'Apps' folder, for instance.
At this point, a brief guide to how the GUI operates may be in order - your disk drives appear at the bottom left of the iconbar and can be explored by clicking once on them to open a 'Filer' (The RISC OS file manager) window. Applications appear at the far right - once you launch an application, it will usually appear here as an icon in the iconbar. You can then normally open a new application window up by left-clicking on it's icon. The application menu can be accessed by middle clicking on the iconbar icon. Inside the application window (eg: the !Edit text entry window), middle-clicking gives you a document-related menu. For instance, you can save the file, search for text etc. Imagine this menu as the equivalent of the menu bar at the top of Mac OS, or running across the top of applications in Windows.
To open a file, either double-click it to open it with the default application, or drag it from a filer window onto the iconbar icon, or the open window. The same goes for saving a file - you will get shown an icon which you can then drag off into any location you want.
Also worth a mention is how RISC OS applications tend to be distributed - they are usually self-contained directories, containing all programs, resources, modules, graphics, etc. needed to run. If you click on the 'Apps' folder, you are really looking at a bunch of directories. The only difference is that the directory names start with an exclamation mark - try holding down Shift when double-clicking on the application names - you will see that instead of running the application (well, actually the !Run script inside the directory), a new filer window will appear showing the contents of the app dir. It's this idea that the ROX-Desktop (in particular, the ROX-Filer) have emulated, and it makes installing or moving applications around very easy.
- "Emulating RISC OS, Page 1/3"
- "Emulating RISC OS, Page 2/3"
- "Emulating RISC OS, Page 3/3"
