Hot on the heels of Stu's A6+, R-Comp Interactive have announced another PC and emulator bundle: the RISCube Ultra. Crammed into the Shuttle case is a top end Athlon XP3200+ processor, 400Mhz bus, 1GB DDR RAM, 160GB HD, 128MB graphics card, DVD/CDR, 7 in 1 card reader, and NVidia Soundstorm audio card. The PC has Windows XP installed and runs RISC OS Adjust under emulation. RCI also include their UniPrintVA software for printing via the Windows drivers. The Iyonix-encroaching price is £999 inc VAT and delivery.

Link: Press release

On a related note, Ian Jeffray has written VirtualAmp, which allows a native Windows MP3 player (WinAmp) to be controlled through a RISC OS interface. This improves performance since the hard work of number crunching is performed on the host processor rather than the emulated ARM. The program, which requires Niall Douglas' CallWin32 VA plugin, has been tested on Red Squirrel but Ian expects it to work just as well on Virtual RPC.

Will development of Virtual Acorn and CallWin32 allow more Windows programs to become accessible through RISC OS in this manner? What effect, if any, will this have on native RISC OS application development? It's a talking point - log in to post your comments.

Link: VirtualAmp