Atomac (pronounced ‘At-ommuk’) is a fairly rudimentary Acorn Atom Emulator. The Acorn Atom was an early Microcomputer designed by the British company: Acorn in 1979. It has the following features:
- A 1MHz 8-bit 6502 Processor (as used in the Apple II, BBC Micro, C64 and others).
- Up to 6K VRAM and 6K RAM for Basic (1K+1K minimum).
- B/W and 4-colour Graphics at resolutions from 64×48 up to 256×192.
- A very efficient, but rather strange version of Basic (BCPL influenced).
- Floating-point ROM extension.
- A Cassette Interface.
The Atom provided the momentum for Acorn to build the BBC Micro and subsequently, the Archimedes which was powered by the widely and increasingly used ARM embedded processor.
Atomac should work at full speed on any PowerMac using Mac OS 7.5 or later. It currently supports Basic, the FPU, Saving and Loading RAM images; a full keyboard; monochrome and colour graphics, but not the cassette interface. It’s best used for learning Atom Basic (which is interesting) and its integrated Assembler. Other Atom links exist (for example, ARRGH), which I’ll add in due time. At the time of writing (Jan 2000), Atomac is the only released Mac Acorn Atom emulator I know of.
(*Updated). This version of Atomac is faster than the previous one (I improved the CPU emulator) and has a few more features, some of which even work. I also corrected a couple of bugs.
“atomac_0.8.1.sit.hqx” Download Atomac 0.8.1 now (.hqx format).
Atomac uses GNU code, so to be fair I ought to release the source code too:
“Atomac0.8.1 Source.sit.hqx” Dowload Atomac 0.8.1 Source (Metrowerks 10 in .hqx format).
Who Is Julian Skidmore?
Here’s a very tiny picture of my face:
It’s not very impressive. I’m really putting things on my Web site, because I think they are vaguely useful, not because I really want to present my Biography. But here’s a bit of Bio anyway.
I was born on Jan 26, 1968; and was educated in my local village primary school at Trowell in Nottinghamshire. Then I went to a local Comprehensive school in Nottingham, before doing a degree in Computer Science at the University of East Anglia. More recently, I’ve been at Manchester University doing an MPhil in Computer Architecture.
