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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 041
Emulators
By Rumrunner/VOID
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Those of us who have been in the game for a while must at least remember
one single emulator that really WAS an emulator. But there are still
emulators, I hear you say. But no, that UAE and the likes are not real
emulators.
I think that one of the more common Emulators were AtOnce, which gave you
a pc in your Amiga 500. How did it do this? With HARDWARE, of course.
You simply removed the processor from the mainboard, stuck the emulator
board in the socket, and there you have it. It could change between Amiga
mode and PC mode, and share ram, diskdrives and eventual harddrives.
Some years later, you also had emulator boards for the bigger case Amigas.
Right now, the name Emplant spring to mind. This emulator had inbuilt
SCSI-2 controller and two Apple-Talk ports. It could utilize parallell
and serial ports as well as CDRom drives via the SCSI-interface or Amiga
filesystems/partitions. It even used graphics cards such as Picasso,
Piccolo or others, if you had such a unit.
And now, this system wasn't meant just to emulate a single computer
system. You simply placed modules on it. I know that you got Macintosh
modules, as well as pc (pentium) modules for it. The company also reveiled
information about other modules, such as Commodore 64/128 and Atari.
I don't know whether these ever came.
Right, that's the plain hardware emulator. You have also had some
products like the "The A64 Package" which, as far as I know, was the first
real Commodore 64 emulator. It was a software package emulating the C64
in a more or less good way, and you could buy a hardware package to go
along with it. It connected to the serial port on the Amiga, and had
interfaces for Commodore tape and floppy drives and even for the printers
you could get for your 64.
Now, what have the emulators of today to offer compared to the above
mentioned ones? Not much, as far as I'm concerned. A software package,
even when it works for some programs, is not good enough. I have read
text files describing how to rewire a Commodore 64 1541 diskdrive to
connect it to the parallell port on the pc, but all of these files have
been rather diffuse and I would not try this if I only had one of either
the pc or the diskdrive. Also, this was only meant to transfer files
outside the emulator, making diskimages, so you couldn't load from the
disk inside the emulator.
Now, I happen to have an idea about why the situation is like this. My
suggestion is that the ones who make emulators today are enthusiasts
without any company supporting them. Therefore, it's more or less
impossible for them to back up their software part of the emulator with
the hardware it deserves. If so happened, the emulators would be a lot
better, although it can never amount to the real computer.
