Slashdot Mirror
Retro Roundup: Old Computers Emulated Right In Your Browser
An anonymous reader writes: If you ever wanted to program an Altair, an Apple I, or a COSMAC ELF you may think you either have to buy one (expensive now) or load and configure simulation software. However, there's a slew of browser-based emulators for everything from a PDP-11 to Windows 1.0 out there. Some use Java, but many use Javascript and many perform better on a modern PC then they did in their original. If you want to learn some history or just want to finally play with the computers you saw in the magazines 35 years ago, these are great fun and slightly addictive.
than the original hardware. It's terrible writing but I can tell what is meant somehow.
Just because we can still understand it doesn't mean we should let people get away with bad writing. If people keep writing badly, this new bad form becomes the new standard.
Oh, come on ... I expected to see an "emulators are for cows" post by now. Someone is slacking off.
Moo.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just because we can still understand it doesn't mean we should let people get away with bad writing. If people keep writing badly, this new bad form becomes the new standard.
I agree! We stop people from misusing the words "bad" and "badly".
We keep trying at Zophar's Domain Javascript but we need more help.
No mention of JSMESS. The Hackaday editors are getting almost as bad as the Slashdot editors: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Javascript_Mess
I should like to informate you, if you care to be orientated, that we increasingly hear more about malwares, softwares, firmwares, and hardwares. I recommend listening to some musics.
...plus, I don't see what the big deal is in terms of "installing an app". If the web version can be turnkey, then so can the 'app' variant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Also, people who apparently either don't have any sense of fun, or perhaps they're all millennials and poo-poo anything older than they are, or maybe both. For cryin' out loud, people, these emulators for (in some cases literally) antique hardware aren't intended for 'serious' use, or development, or anything like that: They're intended to be fun to play with, or maybe educational since most of them are emulating systems that either don't exist anymore or are so rare that you'll likely never even see one in the flesh. Yes, some of us are old enough that we actually owned (or built, as the case may be) some of these systems, but again: If you're complaining about them then I question whether you have any sense of what's fun or not. When some of these computers were available, screwing around with computers was still fun; they're not as much fun in many ways now, because it's all too much serious business, and too much of it is closed-source, proprietary, locks the user out, physically inaccessible, or in some extreme cases you get prosecuted or sued in civil court for getting caught messing with it. In many cases some of the hardware may as well be potted in a solid brick of opaque epoxy, for all the good it'll do you to try to get at the actual hardware. Building a complete computer system from component parts (i.e. requiring soldering)? So impractical now as to be nigh-unto impossible (I could do it, but there's no point anymore). The closest thing we have anymore is you younger guys screwing around with microcontrollers (many of which are more powerful than many of the computers being emulated here, ironically enough), but even then you have to have an entire modern computer just to write the simplest code for them, there's no 'front panel' where you can enter machine code directly, one byte at a time. Don't knock it 'till you try it, guys (and ladies).
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
that the browser is the only way to relive these old machines. There are high-quality emulators for all of those machines, most notably FS-UAE and WinUAE for all things Amiga. Running most of those machines in a browser, even the older simpler ones, will usually be a bad experience.
It's a waste alright. 4ghz cpus for what? To emulate old 8 and 16 bit machines in javascript? what a waste.. there are already better native emulators out there that run locally and provide much better experiences.
Actually, there are plenty of rational comments in this thread, but they've all been moderated down to -1.
Why all non-favourable comments have been greeted with "nuke from orbit" is an interesting question, but it's clear that in this thread, rational discussion and dissenting opinion is not welcome.
Slashdot seems to be getting more and more like this. I've been here a long time, but I can't really say I know why it's happening. I don't. Maybe the art of nuanced discussion is disappearing from public spaces in general.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
So every anonymous poster to the internet needs a grammar checker?
If not, I'm shipping the whole thing out to Sun, postage COD.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My native FLEX / 6809 machine emulator (for Windows XP and at least several Windows versions on up... don't use Windows any more, so I dunno. :)
Late-70s / early-80's machine era.
Front panel, graphics card, single stepping, lots of software including assemblers and compilers. Stable.
If you ever used 6809 Flex, you'll be right at home. Otherwise, probably don't bother.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Still no MIPS SGI emulators, I want my IRIX damnit!
ikr, and what are magazines anyway? Is that what 8-bit apps used to be called or something?
Or grammar chess for the more advanced.
rewriting history since 2109
Checkmate!
If they're using Chrome, they've already got one built-in.
One thing that was cool about my TRS-80 Model I (and indeed of most PCs 35 years ago) was it booted straight into a BASIC interpreter. You cold literally start typing BASIC - And many of us did.
Kids today.
Now get off my lawn.
Thanks to you. I will do the needful.
Wow, blast from the past. My first ever computer was an Ohio Scientific "Superboard"; single board computer with a keyboard on the motherboard, no case, power supply, or monitor. Came with 8KB of RAM, only ran Basic (Copyright Microsoft, 1978) and 6502 assembler (entered in hex). You could load and store your programs to cassette tapes at 300 baud. At the time I was programming IBM/370 mainframes at work in FORTRAN IV. Now get off my lawn.
How about you support the app on Windows, Mac, and Linux? Oh wait, the browser does that already.
Damn this article, ended up playing Rogue for almost two hours.
All I need to know... Does Windows 1.0 come with Reversi?
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
It keeps printing SYSTEMCTL: NOT FOUND. What's up with that?
I am positive that every system emulated in Javascript already has native-code emulators available on those 3 OSes and more. Plus, they'll be available offline and use a fraction of the processing time to run full speed. This is a plus if I want to run some of them on my older laptop with a 4:3 screen, or if I want to use my kinda crappy tablet with its attached keyboard; neither of those systems is necessarily fast enough to run the emulators with the extra Javascript overhead (at least, it would limit me to the older systems, probably pre-90s).
If I want to try something out as a one-time thing, want to access it from multiple computers, or can't install software locally, then sure, I might choose to run the Javascript version of the software. Both ways have their benefits, and that's pretty obvious.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Built-in BASIC = cool, you say? Damn you!
I've wasted countless hours in my life typing BASIC, only to achieve modest results. If only a more powerful language had been included in those machines... Say Forth, or C, or Lisp, or <insert structured-language-of-choice here>. Had any such language been built into popular machines of the day, science and technology would have advanced so much faster that every citizen on this planet would have had his/her own flying car and faster-than-light spaceship by now. But no... BASIC.
I've made many attempts to bring a logical structure into my BASIC programs. To number lines in steps of 10, in order to insert lines as needed. To reserve a range of line numbers for sub-routines. Only to find out that for programming, line numbers AREN'T NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE. Or editing - using a "LIST" command to show a few lines, move cursor to one, edit a copy of it elsewhere on screen, and have it inserted back in. Only to find out later that editing text is easily done full-screen. Yes... BASIC.
Then I found out about machine code. It was like being in coder's heaven, being God of the machine, but very difficult because it was like inching forward with tiny, dangerous steps on a minefield all the f**king time. Knowing that you'd still need that BASIC interpreter to get running, and that the same BASIC interpreter would often get in the way, and eat globs of precious RAM even though you weren't using it anymore. And that no assembler was built in, because there wasn't any room left in the ROM after putting BASIC in there. Grrr.... BASIC.
And let's not get started about the days of Disk Operating Systems. Cryptic commands to do even the simplest of tasks, that low-and-behold actually made a machine somewhat useful.
And to add insult to injury, it turned out that even for low-spec-machine-I-was-stuck-with-because-dad-couldn't-afford-anything-better, many of those more powerful languages were actually available! Some even for free! So manufacturers could have built them into their machines! But no.... BASIC.
b:
debug
a
mov ah,9
mov dx,109
int 21
int 20
db "Hello, world!$"
<enter>
g
Republicans hate cows, it is the way of their kind.Trumpet, trumpet, trumpet.
> How about we don't do it in the browser (for a change)? I have a proper operating system already.
That's great until you want to show it to someone else.
"Hey, check out this cool emulator I was playing with at home. First, let me download this package and unzip it and then install it and all its dependencies, then configure it and play around with the settings to find out why it doesn't work on your video card and why there's no sound...
Tell you what, if I buy a single-core 1GHz CPU to play with these, will you approve?
Oh, forgot... I don't care what you think.