The Emulator Explosion

              An article from Richard Hewison

A long time ago (way back in issue ? of SynTax)
@~I couldn't find which issue it was in either ... Sue
I wrote a feature on the various emulators that were available for
the IBM PC. Well, since then there has been an explosion of
emulators. The list of machines that your PC can now pretend to be
is growing all the time:

Sinclair ZX81
Spectrum (48k, 128k)
Commodore (Vic 20, C64, C128, Amiga)
BBC (Model A, Model B, Master)
Colecovision
Dragon (32, 64)
Vectrex
MSX (Original, MSX-2)
Oric (48k, Atmos)
Apple (IIe, Macintosh)
Atari (400, 800, VCS 2600, 5200, ST)
Tandy (Model 1, Model 3)
Amstrad (CPC 464, 664, 6128)
Cambridge Computers Z88
Sega (Master System, Game Gear, Megadrive/Genesis)
Nintendo (NES, Gameboy, SNES/Super Famicom)
etc.

As ever, the legal implications for many of the above emulators
remains 'dodgy' to say the least. Nearly all of the above require
ROM image files from the original machines.  Technically, if you
have a genuine machine then it is generally considered by most
people to be okay to possess the ROM image file and thus use it
with one of the emulators. The wide-spread availability of
software files (mainly games) is also a very grey area for these
emulators. Some publishers don't mind if (a) the machine isn't
considered to be 'commercial' anymore, and (b) people aren't
making money out of it. There is nothing to stop you from
converting your own old games collection to run under an emulator
if you do it yourself.  However, the fact that the files are
easily available on the Internet and also from many PD/Shareware
companies (especially where the Spectrum is concerned!) means you
probably won't need to.

Enough about the 'legality' issue. The question is - are any of
them any good? Do they work? Well, the answer to both is yes and
yes in most cases, as you will now discover:

Spectrum

This machine is *very* well supported. Z80 v3.04 is the latest
version of what I consider to be the best Spectrum emulator. It
runs best under MS-DOS. It can run under Windows (3.11 and 95) but
the speed of the emulation and some of the tape functions don't
work or behave oddly. It supports all the file formats and can
emulate a Disciple/+D drive (if you have the ROM file), a
Multiface 128 (thanks to an agreement with Romantic Robot),
Microdrives, tapes etc.

Another DOS based emulator is x128, which emulates the 128k
machine. I've not yet seen this in action so it wouldn't be fair
to comment on it. WinSpec is a Win 95 emulator which only supports
the 48k variety. However, it can handle *all* the major (and not
so major) file formats, including .TAP, .SNA, .Z80, .SLT etc. I've
been using it for months and it's worked perfectly despite it
still only being a Beta version.

Commodore

The C64 has been well supported for a while, thanks to C64S and
PC64 (and its Windows incarnation PC64Win). C64 Alive used to be
popular, but I'm not sure if it's being developed anymore. A few
newer emulators allegedly support the C128 as well, but I've not
used one yet so again I can't comment.  For me, C64S (v2.0a) works
fine most of the time. A new version (2.5) has been in testing at
Seattle Labs (to whom you must register with) for a good four or
five months now.  Hopefully it will become available soon.
Transferring disks is easy if you register, as you get the
necessary cable to connect your 1541 drive to the printer port of
your PC. The Vic 20 has also been emulated with great success
recently.

About 18 months ago there was an infamous Amiga emulator which
just showed a picture of the Amiga Workbench request screen and
did little else. Most people at the time thought that a PC wasn't
capable of emulating an Amiga. However, thanks to the latest
version of UAE (Universal Amiga Emulator) - it now can! You
firstly need to transfer the ROMS from your Amiga. Fortunately,
you get the appropriate Amiga program with the emulator. The
instructions say it will only work with 68000 Amigas (i.e. A500,
A600 models) but I also found that it runs the 68020 ROM file from
my A1200 fine. To do anything with the emulator you obviously need
to transfer over some Amiga software too, and thankfully you get
another Amiga program to create a disk image file from any
non-protected disk in your DF0: drive. Then it's just a matter of
getting that 900k+ file onto your PC. The program can handle non-
standard disk formats as well as the standard Amiga disks, as long
as they don't involve on-disk protection (i.e. like most
commercial Amiga games). Emulation is a little slow (even on a
Pentium P120) but it does at least work. It will emulate a hard
disk with a virtual file which you can create to whatever size you
wish. I've run all versions of Workbench and a few games and
utilities and they have run okay. Whilst it has no real practical
use, it's still interesting to finally see this emulator up and
running.

BBC

The BBC Model B Micro was the first machine we ever had at home.
I've been waiting for a decent emulator to appear for ages and
finally here it is. The BBC Emulator (current version 0.3) by Tom
Seddon is a must. You will need to transfer your BBC ROMs over,
but once that has been done then you can fire it up and be greeted
by the old 32k Basic in glorious teletext Mode 7. A few extra
commands have been patched into the machine (for example, you have
to *Mount a disk drive image file before you can *cat it) but
otherwise this early version works rather well. It runs quite a


few of the old classic BBC Micro games like Frak!, Killer Gorilla,
Snapper etc. In future versions the author is going to try and
offer as many options and a general menuing system similar to that
found in the brilliant Z80 3.04. Can't wait!

Sega

Very 'dodgy' ground here, but suffice it to say that the Game Gear
emulators also emulate the Master System and from a speed point of
view, anything from a DX2 66 upwards should be fast enough to
emulate these 8-bit consoles at their original speed. There are a
fair few to choose from too - SMS, Massage, MG to name but a few.
'Massage' is now shareware, but it only costs œ10 to register and
has some great features (snapshot game saves being one!).

The Megadrive emulator 'GenEm' (Genesis Emulator) also performs
quite well, but you'll need a P120 upwards to get the right speed
out of it. Some of the sound routines also don't work properly
yet.

Nintendo

Even more 'dodgy' ground here, but Virtual GameBoy (VGB) runs on a
wide variety of platforms and has versions for both DOS and
Windows 3.11/95. You'll need a DX4 to get the right speed, and
again the emulator is shareware so a few options are disabled.
However, it works very well indeed and games seem to run fine on
it.

The SNES has also had a handful of emulators appear for it in the
last six months. They are slow on anything less than a P120 and
even then the program doesn't seem able to emulate scrolling and
some of the other hardware intensive features that well. Maybe
things will improve with future versions, but personally speaking
I don't know why anyone would bother with it anyway. I never saw
anything on a SNES worth playing!

One last thing. Please don't e-mail me or write to SynTax asking
about ROM or game image files for any of these emulators. If you
need them, convert them over yourself or have a look on the
Internet where you might find a few interesting web pages that
cover the subject in great detail!

















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