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Emulators running on the ST


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You'd think a Mac emulator would be reasonably snappy - if anything, it doesn't need to emulate the CPU, and there should be ways to fake the ROM like MacWorks XL did on the Lisa.

 

Get infos on Spectre emulators for Atari. Once you had the ROMs in the extension, it was a very good and fast mac. And very compatible.

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I had a Mega2 ST in college with the Spectre and AT-Speed. Though the IBM stuff worked 'ok' I could run most of the DOS stuff I needed. With the Spectre I could do all the Mac stuff so it was great. I wrote an English paper on the benefits of the ST in the computer lab vs PC's and Mac's. After I presented it the teacher asked if I had proposed this to the lab director :)

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Emulation on an 8 MHz machine will never really be fast. I remember using the XFormer emu, not very compatible and maybe 60% the speed of a real 8-bit if conditions were ideal.

 

PC-Ditto - I remember running a Pascal editor/compiler and it was painful to use. But we're talking an 8 MHz machine once again emulating an 8086 that ran a little over half the clock speed, effective speed probably would have been under 1.25 MHz.

 

That's the nature of the beast - IMO for emulation to work well you want the host machine to be at least 20 times as fast as that being emulated if the target CPU is different.

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The Magic Sac and later Spectre were really cool, and were more like "translation" than emulation, I suppose. I used a "Fat Mac" (512k) at school a little bit (no expert, here) and it was kind of eye-opening to run Mac software on the ST back in the late 1980s!

 

I always wanted one of the hardware PC upgrades (PC Ditto II, etc) that used the NEC V20 or V30 (whichever it was) processor, but never saw one, and the Atari dealer in my area dried up and blew away before such things became common. By then, an actual '286 PC was the only practical option as prices fell dramatically and it didn't make sense to buy an XT.

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With ZX80/81 there can be an advantage for the emulating machine because the CPU was used to output the graphics during the active display, so the machine was really slow to begin with.

 

With emulation you could probably do away with that - not sure if there was software that took that chore over to produce custom graphics which would necessitate emulation to cater for that.

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Geez, had I known about all these PC emulators for the ST I would have never bought a CompuAdd back in the day. I was THIS close to getting an Amiga with that PC breadbox thing but it was too expensive.

I would have loved to get something like AT-Once to run PC programs from college, but the Atari dealer said it wasn't worth it because you have to cut away thr RF shielding and plug the CPU in it which makes it stop working. Plus buying a second hand PC-AT clone is the same cost.

 

Wished I had Spectre GCR, especially for running Hypercard. And ST-Xformer was only good for running Atari BASIC programs that aren't games.

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I would have loved to get something like AT-Once to run PC programs from college, but the Atari dealer said it wasn't worth it because you have to cut away thr RF shielding and plug the CPU in it which makes it stop working. Plus buying a second hand PC-AT clone is the same cost.

 

Wished I had Spectre GCR, especially for running Hypercard. And ST-Xformer was only good for running Atari BASIC programs that aren't games.

I had a 286 emulator in my 2.5mb STM. I don't remember cutting any shielding. Used it to run dBASE III mostly. Previously I used PC ditto which used to claim to run at a third the speed of an XT.
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