Some say time travel is impossible. But they are wrong. You don’t need Doc Brown and a DeLorean; all you need is an emulator.
Lately I’ve been using DOSBox, an awesome cross-platform IBM PC emulator, to try some old BBS utilities from the 1990s.
I was Googling some DOSBOX topics when I came upon this thread on atari-forum.com, where user BlankVector explains that he compiled DOSBOX for TOS/MiNT. In other words, he was running the modern DOSBox emulator on classic Atari ST hardware. Obviously it was slow and glitchy, but it worked.
Reading that thread led me to consider my own history with emulators.
I think many people use emulators to relive their past. Certainly I do. Today on my Mac I have Hatari, which lets me run Atari ST programs. In the past I used NoSTalgia and PowerST for the same purpose.
I have also used emulators to experience other platforms and software that I never had access to. In this vein I began using Snes9x, which emulates the Super Nintendo, in the early 2000s. All my childhood friends seemingly had an SNES, while I had an Atari Jaguar Using Snes9x was a chance to try some classic games that I only ever saw at friends’ homes.
But I was fooling around with emulators even before all this. In the early 1990s, I remember two emulators in particular which I used on my Atari ST:
- PC Ditto — Released in the late 1980s, it magically transformed your Atari into a slow, but compatible, PC. When I began using our hand-me-down Atari ST as a kid, I tried all the software the came with it from C compilers to games to PC Ditto. But I didn’t really know how to use PC Ditto or what to do with it. It wasn’t until several years later when I wanted to try my hand at creating ANSI art, that I remembered PC Ditto. I used it to run TheDraw, the famous ANSI editor. It was quite slow, but it worked. Eventually I found an Atari-native editor by Eric March called Fansi, and so I switched.
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Xformer — This was an Atari 8-bit emulator. In the early 1990s my family had several hand-me-down 8-bits as well as our 520ST, so I didn’t really need this emulator. Still, there was something cool about the ability to transform my ST into an 8-bit, and it was handy to be able to transfer files from the older systems onto the ST.
What emulators have you used over the years? What do you get out of emulation: is it a way to preserve or relive your past? A way to experience systems or software you never tried before?
Share your thoughts!