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Emulation Issue 01
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| The ALL Format Newsletter Issue #1 - July 1996 |
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-=[Introduction]=-
Welcome to the pilot issue of EMULATION, a newsletter which will hopefully
bring news on the latest developments of all the emulators available, reviews,
and some interviews with the programmers themselves, if I can round them up!
I welcome any submissions for EMULATION. Please mail them to me in plain ASCII
text, using no high-ASCII, and formatted to *79* columns. I reserve the right
to edit whatever you send me and all the rest of that stuff :) I also welcome
your comments good and bad, and any suggestions.
PoiNT BLaNK
(Editor of EMULATION)
point.blank@ukimage.demon.co.uk
-=[Contents]=-----------------------------------------------------------------
<-Articles->
1. Ghost of Sinclair ZX81 rises from the grave to haunt the nerds
2. The new breed: Console Emulation
<-Reviews->
3. MagiC PC, TOS Replacement
=----------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-=[Articles]=-
.,/\ 1. Ghost of Sinclair ZX81 rises from the grave to haunt the nerds /\,.
[The following is an article from The Times, an English broadsheet newspaper]
SOUNDING OFF
Emulations of the early personal computers are now available on the Internet.
Take a look to see how truly awful they were, says David Hewson
NOSTALGIA, as someone once said, isn't what it used to be. If technology
delivered what it promised, it simply would not exist at all. Who would pay
good money for a mint-condition Betamax video recorder? Is anyone sufficiently
insane to lust after one of those 1980s Renault 25s that spoke to you when you
were low on petrol, or said, with unmistakable authority, "Door open"?
There are times when the economics of mass consumer electronics replace
excellence with mediocrity. Compare a decent value-based hi-fi amplifier with
the average chip-driven set off the shelf in Currys and you will know what I
mean. But in general things just get better and cheaper...and who are we to
complain?
This makes it all the more disturbing when you find the past, with its
assorted dross, starts creeping out of the grave and finding its way into your
life. And here we go down that very same path.
Microsoft has just launched a compendium of 1980s games titles so that you can
take out those velvet flares and relearn the joys of the PacMan era. The
company has even opened a Microsoft Museum next to its headquarters in Seattle
where you can use ancient Altair computers, marvel at earlier versions of
Windows, and stare at a collection of pictures of old Bill Gates over the
years.
This is all bad enough but there is worse to come. The new fad among nerd
programmers, it seems, is to harness the power of the latest PCs, and in
particular the PowerPC chip inside the Apple Mac, and produce an entire
software emulation of long-dead monsters like the Sinclair ZX81.
Check out the MAC emulation page on the Web - you can find it at
www.macintouch.com - and you will discover no fewer than three Sinclair clones
itching to run on your PowerMac, plus an assortment of Commodore 64s, old
Atari machines, and even an attempt to recreate the ancient MSX monster.
Worse still, all the original software is still there, now happily stuffed
onto the Net, just waiting for you to download it and go "ooh" and "aah" at
the wonder of it all.
You have to try this stuff, or course, just for the experience. The good news:
it's faster, more reliable and infinitely easier to get up and running than
the original. The keyboard is your PC's own, no longer the cut-off pair of
Marigold rubber gloves that Sinclair used to favour. It runs from a harddisk
not a tape recorder plugged into the side of the machine (though, and I
struggle to believe this as I write, one Sinclair emulation package goes as
far as to let you do this through the microphone socket if you want).
The bad, no, the dreadful news is: it's still a Sinclair ZX81 when you get
there. You still have these funny commands like LOAD and PEEK and CHR$. The
sound - oh yes, you get sound too - continues to resemble the rattle of an
asthmatic frog.
Worst of all - and it came as a genuine shock to me how badly this hurt -
unless you cheat you cannot click on anything. This is pure keyboard stuff.
If you don't know that the J key stands for load, you just sit there watching
a blank screen.
For those of us who entered this particular asylum during the Sinclair
generation this is an unnerving experience. Some blessed amnesia has long
removed the memory of just how bad early computers were. Now instantly, all
that agony of bringing home the dreadful junk from Dixons and trying to get it
to do something, anything, comes back to haunt you. And the horror stories
too. Of cassette tapes that jammed with half of your first novel inside; of
the days it took to get one page of readable print out of a £600 dot matrix
printer; of sitting there and thinking that maybe it makes sense to learn how
to program because Basic sounds such fun.
These are snapshots from our past that should never be taken out in public.
People liked the games of course. Not, if you ask me, because they were
wonderful. It's that, once you mastered that J key, something noticeable
actually happened on the screen. All those hundreds of pounds, all those lost
days and nights of pulling out your hair trying to work out what on earth the
manual was talking about, suddenly had some form of justification, pathetic as
it was.
These little monsters serve one purpose alone: to remind you how far we have
come these past 15 years, and how deeply, deeply grim early computers were.
Feeling nostalgic about the ZX81 is a sign of terminal nerdness, like craving
a ride in a Hillman Imp or buying a ticket to a Gary Glitter concert, if you
are getting those itches it's not an emulation package you need to download.
It's a life.
[Comments people? If its any consolation, the picture of this guy depicts a
sad journalist with a dodgy haircut and glasses.]
.,/\ 2. The new breed: Console Emulation /\,. [PoiNT BLaNK]
Over the last year we have seen an explosion of new and exciting emulation
projects. For me, these have been the new breed of console emulators. Little
did I know how Marat would unwittingly change the overall concept of
emulators.
I first became interested in emulators in 1992. I had sold my Spectrum, and
read a review in a PC magazine about Z80 1.45, the well known Spectrum
emulator. Wow, I thought, I'd be able to run all the games I knew and loved
once again, without the loading errors! This was the most incredible piece of
software I'd ever seen. To think a PC, with a completely different set of
chips and Operating Systems could execute Spectrum code.
It was then that I became a retro junkie, leaching every ancient game I could
find. I soon became interested in emulation in general. At this time, all
the machines which could be emulated were rather old and had really been
confined to the graveyard of the cupboard. The best you could hope for was a
fake Amiga Emulator or Snes Emulator to liven up your day, which disassembled
to a renamed Italian COMMAND.COM.
One day I downloaded a copy of VSMC 0.70. Whilst running almost nothing, I had
respect for this emulator, it did not pretend to be something it wasn't. It
showed that at least someone believed an emulator could do more than run the
entire Spectrum back catalogue, (not that that's a bad thing eh?!)
The next step forward was Ardi's Executor. It was the first emulator I had
seen which could emulate a machine you would own if you could afford it.
OK, so version 1.1 looks primitive now, but it paved the way to show that
modern machines could be emulated at a reasonable speed. In fact, many Mac
games were running faster on my old 386 than C64 efforts.
However, the point of this is, that emulation was still for the enthusiast.
It had no real purpose for the average punter. Demonstrating VSMC or Executor
would bring a grunt of, "uh it won't run Mario", or "where's the colour?" It
wouldn't be for another 2 years until emulators would appear that could run
modern software well, instead of retro games.
Virtual GameBoy kickstarted the console revolution. Bulletin Boards buzzed
with pirated software. Newbies leaped in at all angles for a slice of the
action. It reminded me of the Z80 hayday, when everyone had to collect every
piece of software available, regardless of whether they would play it or not.
No sooner had VGB been ported to the PC, coding group Anthrox announced the
discovery of SPW, a working Snes emulator. SPW and VGB combined to create a
console frenzy as every punter jumped into comp.emulators.misc with endless
questions concerning pirating software. This left the regulars at c.e.m.
feeling misplaced. A newsgroup that had been used for technical discussion and
retro gaming was sabotaged by so-called "lamers" who, frankly, knew nothing
about emulation and had little concern for preserving the computers of
yesteryear, as shown in this extract:
| >I don't know what it is people think emulators are. "Hey, Dave, how come
| >I can't get Daytona USA to work in your arcade emulator? I've got the
| >ROMs." :-) :-)
|
| Unfortunately, an ever-increasing number of people these days have
| absolutely _no_ idea what goes on "under the hood" of a computer... I have
| a suspicion that they think all computers are basically the same, all
| equipment is backwards-compatible; and so all an "emulator" is, is some
| fancy name for a program that lets you fool the PC/Mac/whatever into
| reading a "foreign" disc format so you can run the program.
Whilst many are interested in the workings of the emulators, there seems to be
some aggression now that some people have found a real use for them. Perhaps
we should be thankful that Marat has got recognition for his products from the
masses, which certainly wouldn't have been the case if he'd stuck with MSX
Emulation.
Surely the new wave entering the scene will fuel future development, and
possibly bring new programmers who'll work on projects in the future. The
range of emulators available will always be expanding due to the PC gaining
in speed and power at a greater rate than its counterparts. As the range
expands, so will the market. The possibility of comp.emulators.game-consoles,
shows that the Internet will grow to cater for the sub-divisions.
The new breed will work with us, if we work with it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-=[Reviews]=-
.,/\ 3. MagiC PC, TOS Replacement /\,. [PoiNT BLaNK]
MagiC PC (and MagiC MAC) is a commercial, German TOS replacement. Luckily I
have just taken my German GCSE, have I passed? I don't know!
TOS is the OS used by the Atari ST range of computers. It also emulates the
Motorola 68000 processor along with all the ST hardware. It runs under Windows
95 and NT, but a Pentium 100 with 16MB Ram is recommended. Ugg!
The Demoversion I'm reviewing, is completely in German. The limitations
include shutdown after 15 minutes of usage, disabled sound, a maximum of 4MB
emulated ram, a maximum sized harddisk file of 8MB, a deactivated Windows 95
filesystem and limited graphics modes. This really is just a demo. :)
For those of you who don't know, many of the later Atari ST disks, were
formatted to 720KB and can be read under DOS. They also use the DOS 8.3
filename system. These can be read under the emulator by creating an image,
or by reading them straight from the A: drive. They can then be copied to the
C: harddisk image within the emulator. I do not have any Atari disks not using
this format, so I could not test them.
Initially, I tried a demodisk with a selection of games. Golden Axe worked but
with the screen flashing through palettes. Puzznic, an Ocean game also worked.
Captive didn't work, the screen became garbled and the emulator crashed. I
could not find any form of Joystick support so I couldn't get any further in
the games.
Here is a translation of the menu options in the emulator:
1) Datei File
-Floppy_A -Floppy_A
-Lesen -Read
-Schreiben -Write
-Floppy_B -Floppy_B
-Lesen -Read
-Schreiben -Write
-Beenden -Exit
2) Einstellungen Configuration
-Systemparameter -System Configuration
-Laufwerke -Diskdrive Configuration
-Tastatur -Keyboard Configuration
-Serielle Schnittstelle -Serial Configuration
-Start! -Start Emulator
-Pause! -Pause Emulator
3) Hilfe Help
-Inhalt -Contents
-Suche -Search
-Uber MagiC_PC -About MagiC PC
And if you think I'm translating the help file, then you have another thing
coming!
I am still waiting for StonX to be ported to DOS or Windows myself. The
problem with programmers charging registration fees, is the fact that the
original machine can often be bought for a cheaper price. I saw an Atari 1040
in my local paper for £20 ($35) the other day. As I just want to tinker, I'll
stick with the demo version! However, the 299DM registration is reasonable,
especially compared with Gemulator, which is a combination of hardware and
software.
Overall, MagiC PC presents a nice interface, and an easy way to use your ST
software and even Serial support. A real use could be for music developers
making the switch from Atari to PC or Mac. However, Cubase won't run at
present! For the gamesplayer, support is limited, and if anyone has got their
Joytstick working, let me know.
..............................................................................
Title: MagiC PC 1.0 (MagiC MAC also available)
Publisher: Application Systems Heidelburg
Sites: US: http://www.toad.net/atari/magic/
GER: http://members.aol.com/ashinfo/index.htm
Registration: 299DM, about £35 (Crippleware)
Emulation: TOS Replacement, Motorola 68000, Atari ST Hardware
System: 486 - Windows 95/NT, 2MB Harddisk
Recommended: Pentium 100, 16MB, 10MB Harddisk
Speed: 6/10
Compatibility: 7/10
Overall: 7/10
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-=[Shutdown]=-
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this short, pilot issue of EMULATION. I want to
arrange an FTP site for distribution. If anyone has suggestions or would
consider making a webpage for EMULATION, let me know!
Until then, I'll post this on comp.emulators.misc, alt.binaries.cbm and other
related groups.
Editor: PoiNT BLaNK.................point.blank@ukimage.demon.co.uk
Staff: COULD BE YOU!........ASCII artists, writers, programmers etc
Emulation (c) 1996 - PoiNT BLaNK Publishing, All Rights Reserved.
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