I’ve always been fascinated by software emulators. The earliest example I’ve used that I can think of was a ZX Spectrum emulator on an Atari ST around 1987. I had a real Spectrum for some time at that point and had just bought a ST the year before, when I found this program on a [...]
While I was doing some research around the behavior of Atari ST hardware, I found several interesting sites with quite amazing hardware projects around the ST. There are several people who are in the process of building complete Atari clones based on VHDL (programmable logic chips)! Here’s a few very promising projects: S Like Suska [...]
It’s interesting to see developers open their programming process to the world on their blogs. Here are two recent examples that I found while looking for resources on emulator programming (ahem!) – Miggy is a blog from Bristol in the UK and the owner, t0ne, started work on a Amiga emulator in Java in October. [...]
With the speed increases in computers and browser code, a new class of emulators is slowly growing to significant levels: Emulators built in JavaScript! I wrote about this recently when I found Matt West’s cool Spectrum emulator on the web, and since then I’ve been looking around a bit to see what else is out [...]
This is a little bit geeky, but for the late-thirties/early-forty Euro JavaScript crowd (all five of us) this should be interesting: Matt West just announced the release of his ZX Spectrum emulator completely written in JavaScript. From my perspective, this counts as OMG-WTF Cool! Excellent coding with a very worthy goal. I’d found a working [...]
I’d been exposed to electronics at a young age… I must have been only about five or six years old when my – six years older – uncle was already building radios from scratch and opening every electronic device in my grandparents’ household. I distinctly remember the sharp smell of the soldering iron when we [...]
A recent post over at the excellent DadHacker blog as well as my post from yesterday reminded me of my early programming days. The Sinclair ZX81 came with an exemplary programming manual that made it very easy to start programming immediately in Basic. Those first small programs – in 1K of RAM, no less – [...]
Back in the early 80s – before the Web, the Internet… modems and BBS, really, it was pretty hard to get any kind of information about the just-then available home computers. The only real option were computer magazines, which at the time were of a much rougher quality than anything you’d see nowadays. I very [...]
As a follow-up to my post about the ZX Spectrum last week – I was feeling nostalgic and was googling up sites with information about the home computers of the 80s when I stumbled over this amazing book: The ZX Spectrum Book – 1982 to 199x For starters, the book is about the same size [...]
April 23 2007 marks the 25th birthday of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. No other home computer had more impact in Europe during the early 80s and no other single machine in history has inspired so many teenagers to become engineers, programmers and designers. The computer itself was a stroke of pure genius. Small, powerful, cheap [...]