For context, this emulates RISC OS [1], the operating system designed for the Acorn Archimedes computer[2] — which used the ARM 2 CPU [3] designed by Acorn. Originally, "ARM" meant "Acorn RISC Machine".
RISC OS can also be installed on a Raspberry Pi [4].
Yep, that's me! Heck, how did this land on HN - it's not had anything done to it for AGES.
It was definitely a fun program to write, not long after I wrote BeebEm :-).
You got to love an emulator showcasing an archaic OS with screenshots taken on other archaic OS's (and I'm not intending that in a snarky way; it shows how old some of the early home-computer emulators now are becoming)
The 'archaic' is kind of fun - when I wrote this originally in '95-'97 the machines were ~10 years old; that was old for the time. But that point was over 20 years ago - so the time since I wrote the emulator is much longer than the time from the hardware to the emulator.
In the case of the original ARM2 hardware things are scarce/expensive now.
Those outside the RISC OS world may be surprised that in market potential terms RISC OS peaked at 2. By the time 3 came along PCs were displacing the Archimedes almost everywhere, and one consequence of that is a lot of software, especially early games, never made it even to the Risc PC.
The StrongARM upgrade was phenomenal, but clearly pushing the machine to the limit. Acorn seemed to have a dangerous disinterest in floating point performance though.
On some level I have grown to believe that Acorn were deliberately not producing competitive desktop machines so as to keep ARM off the Intel radar. It has become clear from some leaked documents from Acorn (and discussion on here) that they appreciated the game was up, except for the niche enthusiasts, long before the Risc PC was announced.
Indeed, it was incredibly powerful for the price. The games that came out for it didn't really show what it could do, most were either straight Amiga ports or even more amateurish than Amiga games tended to me.
You'd want a Beeb emulator for that not an Arc; some work has been done on the Beeb emulator for that (although not sure what's still around). There was a fun meeting of the Chamelion project that came out of Uni Leeds many years ago when they were doing exactly that and a bunch of BBC people around.
There's a blast from the past. All kinds of neurons started firing on that mention and they had plenty of dust and cobwebs on them. "The future of interactive computing"... how little we knew.
https://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/index.php
If you just want the OS on x86 with minimal hassle there is also a commercial emulator:
http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm
This company now owns the source code for one of the two forks of RISC OS. The other is now fully FOSS and runs natively on the Raspberry Pi:
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
Here is a good beginner's distro of it:
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/