Virtual Acorn is the company set up to produce and market the commercial (and much faster) version of the Red Squirrel emulator. Red Squirrel is a useful tool, but it is Freeware, and hence unsupported, and comes without any hard disc image or operating system.
The Virtual Acorn emulators come in various versions, available for a Windows PC or Apple Mac and they emulate a RiscPC, but with the ability to support much higher resolution video. VRPC-SE is supplied with RISC OS 4.02, VRPC-ADJ is similar but supplied with a later version of the operating system, RISC OS 4.39, otherwise known as RISC OS Adjust. Both are 'ready to run' complete with the appropriate licensed version of RISC OS and a hard disc image with many useful applications.
As there are free Acorn emulators for the PC and Apple Mac you may wonder why you should pay for a commercial product. The answer is that with Virtual Acorn you get a fully supported and licensed version of RISC OS and is is many times faster than any other emulator. In fact, it's so fast that, on a decent PC, it's considerably faster that any currently available hardware capable of running RISC OS natively.
Although these emulators will work with Windows 95 or 98 this is not recommended. You need Windows 2000, XP or Vista and an internal floppy drive to use Acorn format (800K or 1.6Mb) floppy discs. If you have Windows 95 or 98 or a laptop with an external (normally USB) floppy drive you will be able to use DOS format floppy disc but not Acorn format. Normally there are no problems with Acorn format CDs, although this does depend upon the actual make and model of CD drive fitted.
See the Virtual Acorn web site where you can find full details.
The earlier version of Virtual Acorn, Virtual A5000, has now been discontinued. We did have limited stocks of these but they have now all been sold. However we do sometimes acquire secondhand copies, so please do enquire if you would like a copy.
Freeware emulators
Our RISC 2 PC CD contains a copy of the Red Squirrel emulator for Windows, but although this is the software that the Virtual Acorn emulators are based upon it does not include any hard disc image or software or operating system ROM images and runs at less than one fifth the speed of the commercial programs.
Alternatively there is RPCemu. The main advantage of this is that there are versions for the Windows PC, Apple Mac and Linux. However the last of these is the most advanced version and if you are a Windows user you will probably find Red Squirrel better and certainly easier to set up.
Operating Systems
There is only one commercially available version of RISC OS available for use on emulators. This is a specially prepared package available from RISCOS Ltd. at http://sales.riscos.com.. Not only will this give you a fully licensed copy of RISC OS 4.02 but the necessary hard disc build and comprehensive instructions to get you started with either of the above mentioned Freeware emulators - and it only costs a fiver!
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