arcem

Arcem is an impressive emulator of the Acorn Archimedes, an early ARM-based computer. If you're looking to play games or run software from this vintage machine, you can count on Arcem to get the job done. Thanks to Peter Naulls, you can now find the latest versions of Arcem on a Sourceforge project for Unix, Win32, and RISC OS.

Configuration is simple, as the armulator has only one configuration option: the default endianness of the processor. To produce a big-endian variant, you can build with ENDIAN=BIGEND. The debugger can also select the endianness at run-time.

If you're ready to build the program, simply type make in the source directory, followed by "make install". It's worth noting that this program is known to compile using GCC 2.6.0 on a Sun4, though other builds remain untested. Additionally, it almost certainly will not work on non-32bit machines.

Using the emulator is straightforward. The emulator runs as a separate process and communicates with a debugger via tcp. To start the emulator, type armul where socknum is any number between 1024 and 65535. If the socket is already in use, armul will exit with an error. This version of armul has been designed to work with gdb-4.13 with the ARM/RDP/RDI extensions added (available separately).

To connect gdb to the ARMulator, start gdb and type target arm:, where hostname is the name of the machine on which the armulator is running and socknum is the socket number specified when armul was started. Overall, if you're looking to step back in time with an Acorn Archimedes, Arcem is the emulator you need to make it happen.