reesesWeb

Cute start.

Some punk recently put into my head the idea that I should look at the current state of emulation of '80s software technology. I started with the brilliant looking Amiga emulator Amiga Forever, and made my way to the Atari STE emulator STEEM. I didn't pay for Amiga Forever yet, but I think I will soon.

I have to say, having a 1024x768 full-screen GEM environment up on my laptop was pretty disconcerting. I'll have to leave it like that around the office and see who notices.

I think writing emulators for the ST is probably easier than for the Amiga. There are certainly more of them, like STonX, STew, WinSTon, and lots of other words with "ST" in them. There's even a Java ST emu. I guess it's the lack of four thousand different special-purpose CPUs that makes the ST easier to emulate.

The bad part of this is what happens next...for three days, I have fun, play old games, etc. Then it occurs to me that ST systems are available for a pittance on ebay. I buy one, wait for it to arrive, and end up buying an Amiga, an Atari 800xl, and by the time they arrive, I have ten square feet of dusty computer systems that are booted once, played with for half an hour until everything works, and then put away. I can never remember the various DOS commands, either, so I can't even do anything useful. "Wow, the disk drive lit up -- it works! Umm, how do I get stuff off of this disk?"

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | technorati