"Virtual Acorn is the new brand name for commercial versions of the exceptionally popular Red Squirrel Acorn emulator. The first commercial RISC OS emulator for Windows, called VirtualA5000, emulates an Acorn A5000 computer with up to 16Mb of RAM."It had been put forward on the Archive mail list that a RISC OS emulator was illegal, given that when you buy RISC OS it's only licensed for use on Acorn hardware (or obviously the companies that have taken up the slack after the fall of Acorn). However, Aaron goes on to say...
"Following our agreement with Pace, the copyright holders for RISC OS, VirtualA5000 will be supplied complete with RISC OS 3.11, the universal !Boot sequence and a host of applications (full details to be announced). Projected price is £29 (plus carriage)."There also seems to be consensus from the hardware manufacturers that this won't hurt regular RISC OS sales. This means that you can now (legally) run RISC OS on non-native hardware, such as a PC laptop, albeit slightly slower than on native hardware. It should be more than enough for most usages apart from the latest games however.
VirtualA5000 will get its first public release at the BETT 2002 show, 9th-12th January. There's even a rather snazzy website at www.virtualacorn.co.uk.
