4 ms·

Let me leave a plug here for the rare hacker news commentator that has Apple II nostalgia, C++ skills, and Linux or Windows GUI knowledge. After having tons of

by zellyn 9y ago

Let me leave a plug here for the rare hacker news commentator that has Apple II nostalgia, C++ skills, and Linux or Windows GUI knowledge. After having tons of fun getting my Go Apple II emulator basically working, I realized my efforts would be better spent improving an existing emulator than bringing mine up to parity, and switched my efforts over to working on OpenEmulator. It has a portable emulation library at its core, and a relatively thin layer of Mac OS GUI to show the windows, etc. If someone with the right skills helped to create GUI layers for Windows and/or Linux, I believe it would become much more popular, and start attracting more development to add functionality, peripherals, etc. It already has some of the best disk emulation, and almost certainly the most accurate CRT emulation of any Apple II emulator. If you'd like to try it out, try 4am's build: https://archive.org/details/OpenEmulatorSnapshots https://archive.org/details/OpenEmulatorSnapshots

CJefferson 9y ago
What does it offer over MAME (which merged in MESS), the grand-daddy of multi machine emulators?
- zellyn 9y ago
  Areas where OpenEmulator is better: GPU-shader CRT emulation that looks almost just like a real CRT (I have real monochrome and color CRTs for my Apple IIe, and did a lot of comparisons while implementing double hires support for OpenEmulator). Also, better disk emulation that (because of a quirk of how it works) can handle some copy-protect schemes better. Areas where MAME is better: cross-platform, and you can set breakpoints and debug etc. More devices. Probably more positives, but I'm not super familiar with it. I mostly used it to compare bugs while working on https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit :-)
52-6F-62 9y ago
This is great! But it's delaying me from hitting the grocery store for coffee and bacon. I'll definitely be playing with this some more. I haven't touched BASIC since high school. Just as an aside, there is another [great] project with a similar name "OpenEmu": http://openemu.org/ http://openemu.org/
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Just pulled it down and ran it. Very nice.
- zellyn 9y ago
  Just to be clear, all the great parts are the work of the original author, Marc Ressl… :-)

by zellyn 9y ago

CJefferson 9y ago

What does it offer over MAME (which merged in MESS), the grand-daddy of multi machine emulators?

zellyn 9y ago
Areas where OpenEmulator is better: GPU-shader CRT emulation that looks almost just like a real CRT (I have real monochrome and color CRTs for my Apple IIe, and did a lot of comparisons while implementing double hires support for OpenEmulator). Also, better disk emulation that (because of a quirk of how it works) can handle some copy-protect schemes better. Areas where MAME is better: cross-platform, and you can set breakpoints and debug etc. More devices. Probably more positives, but I'm not super familiar with it. I mostly used it to compare bugs while working on https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit :-)

52-6F-62 9y ago

This is great! But it's delaying me from hitting the grocery store for coffee and bacon. I'll definitely be playing with this some more. I haven't touched BASIC since high school. Just as an aside, there is another [great] project with a similar name "OpenEmu": http://openemu.org/ http://openemu.org/

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Just pulled it down and ran it. Very nice.

zellyn 9y ago
Just to be clear, all the great parts are the work of the original author, Marc Ressl… :-)