The Computer History Simulation Project
ChunKing writes "The Computer History Simulation Project is a loose Internet-based collective of people interested in restoring historically significant computer hardware and software systems by simulation. The goal of the project is to create highly portable system simulators and to publish them as freeware on the Internet, with freely available copies of significant or representative software. I can't wait 'til someone fixes me an OS/390 emulator to remind me of the days when I used to be an Ops Analyst for a major bank..."
And yes, my Atari ST nostalgia was revised by one of the truly great emulators around then, PacifiST. Nowadays the best emu would be Steem - try it! Little Green Desktop has applications to use
it's in my head
There already is a S/390 emulator... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux on it.
Hercules is an S/370 etc. emulator, it does not emulate OS itself. It's complicate to run recent OS versions on Hercules for legal reasons, the operating system is usually licensed to particular machines.
Virtutech's simulator Simic was used by e.g. Suse for porting Linux to AMD's upcoming x86-64 (Hammer project). You can read more in a twelve page article available at Simic's homepage. http://www.simics.net/simics/simics-computer-febru ary-2002-w-cover.pdf
Apparently it simulates a great number of hardware as seen from the benchmarks given in the article:
Table 1. Simics performance of target systems for a variety of operatingsystem boot workloads.
Target Boot workload Instructions Time (sec) MIPS
Alpha-ev5 Tru64 2,112,119,247 354 5.9
Alpha-ev5 Linux 1,201,600,120 164 7.3
Sparc-u2 Solaris 81 1,597,537,438 284 5.6
Sparc-u3 Solaris 81 6,155,835,717 987 6.2
x86-p2 Linux2 1,299,639,608 227 5.7
x86-p2 Windows XP 3,129,351,000 1,518 2.1
x86-64 Linux2 1,299,639,608 285 4.5
Itanium Linux 4,644,372,142 1,470 3.2
PPC-750 VxWorks 1,179,516,468 136 8.7
PPC-750 Linux3 498,836,969 53 9.3
Yes, yes you will! :-)
This is where I found an emulator that works very well: TRS-80 Emulator Web Site