Archimedes Emulation
One fantastic example of low-polygon 3D gaming, was the Acorn Archimedes game Lander ( David Braben,1987) , later Zarch, later Virus (Amiga, ms-dos etc.). By - famed author of Elite. From my recollection, it had very satisfying physics model, and your ‘hover-craft’ kind of ‘bounces’ along on jets of air.
Wanting to get some screenshots (like the one above) and have a fly around, I tried to get hold of an emulator , rather than digging out the original hardware, and trying to get a screen-grab ported from the Arc to my PC or iBook. Having a 3button mouse on the PC (a real innovation when Acorns Arc launched), meant an emu I’d use would have to be PC based. And these are what I found:
Red Squirrel
Started off really well, but crashed on trying to read a floppy drive -which I’m supposing is because I don’t have a phyical 3 1/2″ floppy drive, but can’t see how else to run disk images (the ‘virtual floppy’ file type).
ArcEm
Boots up fine (and straight into the desktop environment), but doesn’t seem to run the internal system programs, like calulator and paint, and crashes if the mouse-pointer goes anywhere near the icon for the hard-drive. Maybe the Unix or MacOs versions are more successful, and at least it seems people are still working on it.
Archie
Supposed to run under dos, and be executable through windows. No chance, black screen, returns to windows. Probably hasn’t been updated for XP, as there is little to no support information on the web, it’s homepage has closed down etc.
Arculator
Reads files properly, but for some reason looks like its skipping every other pixel in a vertical order, making the whole thing look ugly and ’stripey’. The screengrab above was made by duplicating the image and filling-in the black lines.
To run any of these emulators, you’ll need to have the original OS roms, which are still under copyright as I (part) own an original Archimedes computer it’s not too much of a problem. However, ripping the roms data out is very complex, and whilst you can find them on the web, an actual, physical Archimedes on Ebay, goes from around £5-£30, and might be worth picking up for pure curiosity value, and a lot more fun than your latest x-station-play-box title!