New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Anyone here like playing around with classic computer emulators? I just updated my list of common ones.

It's interesting to see an Epson HX-20 emulator is now being worked on (see the link at the bottom of the article containing the list).

I run WinUAE, VICE, Basilisk, SheepShaver and DOSbox. I'm really stoked to see what sort of performance differential has been gained by WinUAE in the last few years, it now also has full A570 HDD support too

I use DOSBox, ApplePC (within dosbox), AppleWin, KEGS, Basilisk II, and a couple of others (an altair machine one I can't remember the name of.)

Don't forget my Vic 20 emulator
http://www.mdawson.net/vic20beta/vic20.php

matsondawson wrote:Don't forget my Vic 20 emulator
http://www.mdawson.net/vic20beta/vic20.php

LOL! Very cool Matt

It was good to get to know a little more about what you do via the website too.

tezza wrote:LOL! Very cool Matt

It was good to get to know a little more about what you do via the website too.

Indeed... normally all I see of Matt is being outbid by him.

Did you know there's an emulator for the Apollo Guidance Computer?

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

For emulation of more traditional systems I use MAME4All (Arcade), GP2Xpectrum (ZX Spectrum), UAE4All (Amiga), Frodo (C64) and Wiz-CAP32 (Amstrad) for handheld retro gaming on my GP2X Wiz. I don't do much in the way of Desktop emulation as I prefer to use the real thing.

I find the whole concept of emulating hardware in software very interesting and wish I had the skills and time to dabble in it. I imagine intellectually it would be hugely satisfying...a bit like constructing your own computer really.

My first involvement with emulators came way back in 1991 or so when I tested some alpha and beta versions of Jeff Vavasour's TRS-80 Model 1 emulator. I was very excited about this project as my System 80 was up in the loft and I hadn't touched it for years. I wanted to run those old programs on my PC-Clone. The first time I saw that NEWDOS 80/v2 banner forming slowly on the amber monitor of my PC was truely exciting.

Ahh, those were the days!

There's my ubee512 Microbee emulator, This was a well known microcomputer in Australia from the 80s. I know there was some interest in NZ for it:

http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/reposit ... %2Fubee512

Stewart

beestuff wrote:There's my ubee512 Microbee emulator, This was a well known microcomputer in Australia from the 80s. I know there was some interest in NZ for it:

http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/reposit ... %2Fubee512

Stewart

Thanks for this. I remember the microbee. I'll take a look when I get some time.

I had been running/interested in running various emulators over 10 or more years? But not much in the last 5? years.

When I first started, it was with the Mame emulating the classic coin-op videogames of the 80s' - and the PCs then (early 90s') just able to run these at so-called full speed. I got interested in Atari 8-bit emulation - first with XFormer then Atari800win - and was pleasantly surprised at being able to run a slideshow of some of my old Atari artwork/drawings - though I had no means of transferring files from 5.25" Atari diskettes to PC - and had to rely upon a helpful contact, doing that for me.
Because I was into the videogames consoles (Megadrive and SNES) - I was of course interested in emulation of those machines - although I always had my SNES console. When the Nintendo 64 was emulated - that was a major breakthrough at the time - when a fast PC could emulate this still available console at full speed. Mario 64 seemed to run perfectly fine. If you are into videogames - you can't ignore the various groundbreaking videogames - no matter what console or platform they are on. There is good reason why consoles had the better games on them, than say - on the computers. If you never played Super Marioworld - a Nintendo SNES game - you are missing a masterpiece.
Anyway emulation was a way to visit or revisit the various computers/consoles/etc that you always heard about and never really played. For example I recall only briefly seeing a Vectrex running in a store - and it was nice seeing this complete all in one console running nice vector graphics. Running the Vectrex emulator almost gives you the same experience.
I did test out an Atari 800 emulator running on a friend's Dreamcast console - Sega's last videogame console. I tested "Hawkquest" on it, and it seemed to be running as if it was on an Atari, with no problems - I used a PC keyboard plugged into it.

I should make up a list of videogames - which are 'must to be experienced/played' - that should be of interest to those who want to be videogame designers? and such like... Innovation and breakthroughs being key words..

Harvey