In memory of Rod Hull... (General Comments...)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	General Comments...
Date:	11/03/02 (281 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Intense nostalgia factor, the opportunity to use machines you never got the chance to, no more 7-minute loading waits!

Disadvantages: Copyright factors, you lose the *feel* of the machines

The great majority of writing on the subject of "retrogaming" and the like is concerned with the emulation of consoles and arcade machines (Mame being the best-known name here) - that is to say, dedicated gaming systems. But there is another branch of retro computing - that concerned with the emulation (and simulation - I'll explain the distinction later on) of that very 1980s phenomenon, the general purpose home computer.

I'm firmly of the opinion that those of us who grew up in the eighties were most fortunate with regard to computing - the basic (pun semi-intended) design of the eight-bit micros means that for many tasks there was simply no alternative to rolling up your sleeves, flexing your typing fingers (both of them) and getting down to writing an appropriate program yourself. There was never a time before, and may never be again, when nine-year-olds were routinely taught programming in schools.

It was an exciting time (and not just because of Chris Curry [of Acorn] and Clive Sinclair having a punch-up in the Baron of Beef pub...). While the big names of the era - Sinclair, Commodore, Acorn, Atari - kept their pre-eminence throughout, joined by Amstrad in mid-decade, the microcomputing press was constantly awash with press puffs and full-page adverts for "new and improved" machines from other manufacturers - the Dragon 32, the Jupiter Ace, the Aquarius, the Lynx, the Enterprise (which was originally known as the Elan, and then - honestly - the Flan!)...

Although the majority of these smaller firms went under when the computing bubble burst around 1985 (Amstrad was the last really successful entrant to the home market), a few ideas such as MSX (a brave early attempt to create a home computer "standard") struggled on into the PC era, and what might reasonably be considered the last great victory of the eight-bit era, the Amstrad PCW, has only very recently gone out of production.

Given
all this, then, it's hardly surprising that that there should be a considerable number of people who, for whatever reason, yearn to return (there's a catchphrase for you) to the simpler joys of the world of C15 cassettes and thermal printers. But there are problems. While the more successful micros are still available reasonably easily via eBay and the like (a Spectrum can be picked up for about £20, a ZX81 for less than double that), some of the early machines are getting very rare now - a Jupiter Ace or ZX80 will be well into three figures (why didn't I keep my two!?). And there's also the problem of obtaining software and peripherals, hard enough without eBay rip-off merchants tryint to convince you that the Specturm's introductory "Horizons" cassette (real value about 50p) is worthy of the "!L@@K! !!!!R@R3!!!!" treatment...

Fortunately, a combination of the much increased power of modern PCs (I use the word here to include Macs, Acorns etc, purely to annoy fundamentalists...) and the rise of the internet has produced an alternative: the emulator. (Yes, yes, and the simulator - I *will* come to that in due course, honest guv.) A reasonably recent Pentium is powerful enough to reproduce in software the hardware of an eight-bit micro, with the help of an "image" of the machine's ROM.

I'm simplifying a fair bit here - apologies to those who know a lot about the technical side of things - but in essence a ROM can be thought of as the operating system of the micro, which in the 1980s was usually built into the machine in the form of a handful of chips (sorry, no mushy peas. Or guacamole, Mr Mandelson), thus allowing more or less instant bootup (you listening, Mr Gates?). It's important to understand that this use of the word "ROM" is somewhat different from the one used by console emulators - broadly, the image of a particular game cartridge.

Ah, you may say (and in the
privacy of your own home who's to stop you saying such a thing?), but if you're going to use images of the micro's ROMs, surely there will be all sorts of nasty copyright implications. Well, no use beating about the bush - yes, there are, and one could easily write (people have done) lengthy essays on this subject alone. Copyright on the net is a tricky subject at the best of times (type "Scientology copyright" into Google and see what you end up with), but on the subject of emulation we discover a tangled web indeed. Perhaps I should use this space to clear up a few myths on the subject:

* "It's legal to evaluate the game for 24 hours." No, it isn't - there's no such thing as the fabled "24 hour rule". The only way you can legally "try before you buy" is if the game is shareware. Readers with long memories may remember the emulation site "Dave's Classics", which disappeared partly because of this myth.

* "The games are 'abandonware' anyway." Nope - there's no such thing as "abandonware", legally - either the copyright holder allows distribution or they don't. I cetainly agree that 70 years (or whatever - it varies a little by country) is a ridiculous length of time for a computer programme to be protected - I'd like to see them patented and protected for 20 - but that's the law. Whether the publishing house is still in business makes no difference.

* "The copyright holders won't care anyway." You'd be surprised, matey - some of the old eight-bit publishers, Codemasters being a famous example - are still around, and take their copyrights very seriously. And some (eg Ultimate Play the Game) have been subsumed into newer companies (Rare in this case). It's true that the majority of games are still easily available - and who among us can say that we've *never* copied a CD onto tape? - but the law
still stands.

* "It's OK if you put up a disclaimer on your download site." Wrong again. Some shops - HMV seem to be a persistent offender here - have incurred the wrath of Codemasters etc for distributing "shovelware" CDs packed with thousands of Spectrum games for use with emulators. The packaging does carry a disclaimer (in tiny print) but that's no defence. Just the other week, actually, I saw a "Speccy Classix" CD in an HMV in Birmingham whose back cover contained a large screenshot of a "Dizzy" game. Published by Codemasters. Oh dear.

* "It's fine if you own the original hardware/software." This is a bit of a grey area, actually, and I don't think it's ever been tested in court. My *personal* opinion is that yes, this is at least *morally* all right, but "I am not a lawyer" and all that, so don't quote me on the subject.

In the main, though, and surprisingly given the virtual state of war that exists on the subject where consoles are concerned, particularly in America, the micro emulation scene is fairly free of tension. I suspect that the lack (so far...) of a European equivalent to the ludicrous American "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (think that's bad? Look up "SSSCA" on Google to see what could happen next), coupled with the micro emulation scene's relatively upstanding image (you'll look long and hard before you find the dread word "warez" on an eight-bit site) has helped in this regard.

One way out of the copyright problem, at least so far as ROMs are concerned, is to simulate rather than emulate. (See, told you we'd make it in the end!) The difference is that a simulator, while being compatible with the "target machine" does not use any of the original code, but rather arrives at the same outcome via different means. WINE, a Linux application that allows many Windows programs
to be run, works like this (hence its acronym - "Wine Is Not an Emulator) - indeed, it's reasonable to consider Linux itself a simulator, of UNIX.

Thankfully, not every computer emulation requires such contortions in order to stay the right side of the law. The best seller here in the UK, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, is a case in point. Thanks to Amstrad (the owners of the rights to the machine), emulator authors are allowed to bundle the ROMs with their programs provided that it is on a non-commercial basis. This enlightened attitude has led to the Spectrum emulation scene being one of the largest and most vibrant around, with new programs still being produced. This creates its own problems, though, such as the difficulty of making sense of what's hot and what's dross.

Which is where "World of Spectrum" (at www.worldofspectrum.org) comes in. This fabulous resource is one of the most impressive and comprehensive sites you'll find anywhere on the subject of classic computing, and should be top of every Sinclair retrogamer's favourites list. You'll find a link to the comp.sys.sinclair FAQ, which is mainly concerned with the eponymous Usenet newsgroup, but also contains a fantastically detailed list of virtually every Sinclair emulator ever released (fancy a Spectrum on your TI-92 calculator? Look here!), including those for the Speccy's siblings, the ZX80, ZX81 and QL. There's some seriously technical documentation about the Spectrum's innards. And there's a link to the enormous Spectrum games archive (copyright again - more on that in a mo).

Perhaps most impressively of all, there's the "Copyrights and Distribution Permisssions" page, into which a massive amount of effort has gone. Several fine people have spent enormous chunks of their time trying (with some success) to contact the copyright holders of Spectrum games, and asking them how they feel about them being emulated.
A good number have replied, and although some (Ultimate, for example, as mentioned above) have said no, a surprising quantity have agreed to the distribution of their games. (The site reprints their permission emails/letters to prove it.) And games where permission has been denied are not carried in the archive. This excellent initiative means that retrofans can know for certain whether they can legally download Head Over Heels (yes) or Atic Atac (no) for their emulator.

Enough of the Spectrum, then (save to urge you to subscribe to comp.sys.sinclair, though what that newsgroup needs is more ZX80/81 and QL fans!). Let's have a brief look at some of the other emulators available (and I've banged on about copyright enough now, so I think we can take that bit as read). I won't generally give URLs, because they change very frequently. Type the name of the micro into Google and you should get what you're looking for - if not, try "Computers > Emulators > Targets" in the Google directory.

*Commodore 64*
This machine was the Spectrum's biggest rival for the gaming market, and had very good graphics and sound, as well as a large RAM capacity. Unfortunately, it also had the unbearably slow 1541 disk drive, and one of the worst BASICs ever released, necessitating the use of reams of POKEs for virtually anything interesting. (Unsurprisingly, extended BASICs such as "Simon's BASIC" sold quite well for the machine.)

There are quite a few emulators available for the C64, of which "Frodo" is among the best, though the DOS "CCS64" is also quite widespread.

*BBC Micro*
Ah, wonderful machines. I've still got a real one of these (a Model B+ 64K with a double Watford disc[sic] drive, if anyone wants to know), and it's lovely. Although the Beeb suffered from being very expensive (the Model B was over twice the price of the Spectrum 48K), you did get a good quality machine
for your money. It had a very fast, structured BASIC (which could handle inline assembler without batting an eyelid), a sophisticated sound system (second only to the C64's, and much easier to program), a good choice of graphics modes (to this day, Teletext pages are done on a modifed BBC Micro) and - yes - a decent range of games. Acornsoft's "conversions" of then-current arcade games were so good it seemed rather ironic in their latter days that they moaned so much about copyright - Planetoid (Defender), Arcadians (Galaxians) and Snapper (Pac-Man) are pixel-perfect. And then there was Acornsoft's greatest achievement: Elite.

The best emulator I've found for the BBC is Richard Gellman's "BeebEm". This will emulate either a standard 32K Beeb or the 128K Master. It'll handle tape images, disk images, printers, the RS423 port, the AMX mouse, ROM cartridges, joysticks, mousesticks, alternative DFSs, user-defined keyboards, full 4-channel sound (with ENVELOPE)... and so on. An alternative is "PC-BBC", but in my view it's no better, and also costs money. ROMs are no problem - since the demise of Acorn, Pace (the modem and set-top box people) have acquired the rights and are happy for them to be distributed from certain places. Try "The BBC Lives!" site first.

*Apple II*
The Apple II (or ][, or //, or whatever) is another famous machine, but you have to work just a little bit harder to find a decent emulator for this one. Those that do exist all have a few quirks - one I like is "AppleWin", which concentrates on the Apple //e. It seems to be able to cope with most things, and has the necessary options to adjust speed and so on.

*ZX81*
I'm getting quite emotional here. The ZX81 was my first computer, way back in April 1983 (when it was already virtually obsolete!), and other than the BBC it's the only one for which I still write programs. "Xtender&q
uot; is the best emulator by some way, with all sorts of extensions (adjustable speed, a rudimentary filing system, extended BASIC etc) but the current version has been stuck at beta stage for months now. It's perfectly useable in straight ZX81 mode, and doesn't seem to crash much, but it can't be guaranteed. As an alternative, "vb81" seems to do quite well.

*Others*
Whatever computer you'd like to emulate, there's probably a program available to help you. I've seen emus for the PC that will conjure up for you (among many other micros):

Acorn Electron
Amstrad CPC
Atari 800
Cambridge Z88
Commodore PET
Commodore Vic 20
Dragon 32
Enterprise
Jupiter Ace
Laser 200
Mattel Aquarius (ugh)
Memotech MTX
Oric 1
Tandy TRS80
TI99/4A (actually a 16-bit machine, but generally lumped in with the eight-bitters)

I'll leave you, though, with the weird and wonderful world of mainframe simulation. There are programs available that will simulate (relatively) recent mainframes - the S/370 and S/390 series, for example - but what we're interested in here is real retro stuff. I will give URLs here, as the sites are pretty stable and otherwise quite hard to find. So let's see what the oldest system we can find is.

A good first bid comes in from EDSAC, the world's first general-purpose stored-program computer, which began operations in 1949. There's a very good emulator, complete with program library (including Life!) here: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/

We can do better, though. The Manchester Mark I (known as "Baby") ran its first program in June 1948. A simulation of this machine is available by FTP from here: ftp://samson.kean.edu/pub/leew/ssem/

Unfortunately, the ENIAC simulator long promised by the University of Pennsylvania has never appeared in public (we've been waiting since 1944!), so that's o
ut. But we can go even further back. One of the first machines that might lay claim to the title "computer" was the Bombe at Bletchley Park, used to crack German WW2 codes. There's a Java version on this page: http://library.thinkquest.org/28005/flashed/timema chine/courseofhistory/bombeapp.s html

And of course there's a simulation of the Enigma machine itself (no sending it to Jeremy Paxman, now): http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~andlaw/engindex. htm

But I think we must award the palm of honour to a machine which was never actually built - Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. There is a Java simulation (some Java knowledge needed) of the thing here: http://fourmilab.ch/babbage/

Babbage designed the Analytical Engine in 1837. Now simulating *that*, I think you will agree ladies and gentlemen, deserves the title of "retrocomputing".

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PS: The answers I have given in the multiple choice boxes refer to BeebEm, as that's the emulator I use most frequently. The wide variation in quality in this field makes general answers impossible.

PPS: Why Rod Hull? Easy - a common abbreviation for emulator is... emu!

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