As far as I can tell it doesn't work with Acorns Java v0.76. But even if we had the latest version of a full Java 'thing', would a game like jagex work under RISC OS? Would it run at full speed?

And on a related note, are there any (plans for) RISC OS rpg games in a similar vein to Biowares stuff (Baulders Gate etc.)?

There's a brilliant free 3d rpg game at http://www.jagex.com/runescape.html that you can play in your browser window because it's written in java.

It could be written in COM and you could still play it in your browser window....

As far as I can tell it doesn't work with Acorns Java v0.76. But even if we had the latest version of a full Java 'thing', would a game like jagex work under RISC OS? Would it run at full speed?

That would rather depend on whether it depended on any non-standard or extension Java APIs - eg does the engine require OpenGL bindings (in which case it won't work), does it require Java3D (in which case it probably won't work because Java3D wasn'ta standard part of Java last time I looked).

If it was pure Java x.xx and we had a Java x.xx implementation then in theory, yes it would work. However it's usually not quite that simple in practise.

Would it run at full speed? Difficult to say as I've not played. Looking at the screenshots I'd imagine that an XScale would cope.

What spec PC are you playing it on (and what OS and JVM)? I might be able to give a better answer if I knew that.

And on a related note, are there any (plans for) RISC OS rpg games in a similar vein to Biowares stuff (Baulders Gate etc.)?

The closest are probably Andrew Westons Overcast 2, more on which can be found at

http://www.aweston.redhotant.com/

and The Forever Story by Shane (surname?) at

http://members.aol.com/ramuhuk/

And if anyone sees me, I'm 'Hairy Harry'. Brown beard with greenish clothes.

1) They're very different architectures
2) The PII has the benefit of a huge cache (more on this in a bit)
3) The PII has an FPU.
4) In terms of outright raw performance the PII 350 probably beats the SA 233 - a lot of what you're seeing is Windows overhead.

The point about the cache is that the Java code will be interpreted byte code. The size of a Java interpreter along with the actual bytecode itself will overwhelm the SAs measily 16k caches. The PII will fair a lot better here. Offset against that is tha fact that the SA has always given good caffeine mark ratings.

With a kinetic I'd expect the difference to be a lot less but there's no getting away from the fact that on raw numbers alone a PII 350 is faster than an SA 233.