Ethical Companies – The Blog

Following on from yesterday’s post about emulation here’s part #2 discussing emulation of 16 bit computer systems. You know the ones I mean: The Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, amongst others.

Years ago when Amiga was first released there was a lot of debate about whether to buy the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga; it was the Commodore 64 vs Sinclair Spectrum battle all over again …. Commodore’s offering was the first multi tasking offering on the market and technically a superior machine to the Atari offering with superior graphics and sound. Many Commodore 64 owners took to the Amiga like a duck takes to water and the Amiga saw some excellent game and demo offerings.

Amiga emulation has always proved a bit “tricky” on the PC as the system comprised of several custom chips and it uses a fair bit of processing power to emulate it well on PC. The main emulator for running your old Amiga software is WinUAE (Windows Ultimate Amiga Emulator.) It’s a bit of a bitch nuisance to set up and get running smoothly though, but you should get it going in 10 minutes. You may need find to a copy of the Amiga BIOS and operating system, a Google search will help you with this.

The best Amiga games ? Well, in my opinion:

• Defender Of The Crown – One of the original games for Amiga and a superb title. Take over feudal England and restore the monarchy. You don’t even need an emulator for this one, you can play the Flash version online right here.
• Lemmings – Oh come on, you know this game surely ? Classic Amiga puzzle platform game.
• The Secret Of Monkey Island – Classic point ‘n’ click game, shows up on PC as well.
• Frontier Elite 2 – Remember Elite from yesterday’s article on the Commodore 64 ? Well this is more of the same, better graphics etc.
• Populous – Superb God game.

And for some reason there’s quite a few pinball games on Amiga. Not surprising I guess as the Amiga had the power to do the format justice, C64 pinball games had been pretty dire.

And what of the Atari ST ?  Personally I liked the ST.  Ok, it wasn’t an Amiga (rumours were around for ages that there would be an emulator for ST on Amiga so you could play all ST software on your Amiga, it never happened) but it was still a nice system.  The operating system was Digital Research’s GEM, not dissimilar to the Amiga Workbench but not as “pretty” or as advanced. The best emulator seems to be STeem Engine which you can get from the Little Green Desktop website. The Atari ST had much the same games as the Commodore Amiga as well as the superb Goldrunner, an excellent shoot ‘em up. You can see STeem Engine running Frontier Elite 2 here:

You’ll find other emulators for 16 bit systems such as the Acorn Archimedes here.

More emulation posts to come.

Steve

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Emulators on Wikipedia.

“An emulator in computer sciences duplicates (provides an emulation of) the functions of one system using a different system, so that the second system behaves like (and appears to be) the first system. This focus on exact reproduction of external behavior is in contrast to some other forms of computer simulation, which can concern an abstract model of the system being simulated.”

Ok, that’s accurate but somewhat “dry.”  Basically emulation allows you to use software for one system on another system.  For example you can run Windows software on Linux or Macintosh or ….  More interestingly you can play old games from non PC systems on your PC.  This ranges from the 8 bit systems of the 1980’s through the 16 bit glory of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga to consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast and Sony Playstation 2.

I discovered computer emulation about 1995 or so with the C64 emulator C64S.  Whilst it wasn’t stunningly compatible and didn’t run all C64 games on your PC it did work on a 386 PC under MS-DOS.  The Commodore 64 was a massively popular home computer and there are thousands (I mean that, it’s not an exaggeration) of games available for it and they are not too hard to find on the internet with the use of Google.  Your verdict on C64 games may of course vary but for me these are some of the classics:

• Elite. Heck, who hasn’t heard of this one ?  It started life on the BBC Micro B, and was also ported/written for:  Sinclair Spectrum, Acorn Electron, Commodore 128, various other BBC models, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore Plus4, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Apple 2, 2 PC versions and even a port for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console.
• Ultima IV. A classic computer RPG and for me one of the greatest RPGs ever.  Again converted for several systems including the C64, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.  Don’t think it made it to any of the other 8 bit systems, as it was very large on 4 disks so may have been out of the reach of many 8 bits which were tape drive orientated.  Might have been available on the Apple 2 ?
• Paradroid. Superb game where you run around a spaceship as a robot destroying all the rogue robots to regain control of the ship.  A little crude graphically now, but heck what a game considering it was under 40k in length !  C64 only, although a new version called Paradroid ‘90 later appeared on the 16 bits.
• Impossible Mission. You might have seen this in the last year or so turn up on the Nintendo DS; yes it’s the same game.  Was released on various 8 bit systems, including the Sega Master System and the NES if I recall correctly.
• Sanxion. Superb shoot ‘em up and one of the pioneers of the genre.  Also the game which brought Rob Hubbard to fame for the music which he wrote for the game.  Converted to Sinclair Spectrum but the music soundtrack was “destroyed” in the process as the Commodore 64 was streets ahead musically over the Spectrum.
• Hypersports. A joystick thrashing game.  I played this one ….  A lot.  The skeet shooting was my favourite bit.  Also ported to several other 8 bits.
• Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Classic command line text adventure.  How many hours have been wasted trying to get the babel fish on this game ?  Shows up on various platforms, not very processor intensive so easily written, even for low end 8 bits.

I could go on for hours ….  As you can probably tell I was a big Commodore 64 fan.  Here’s the Commodore 64 emulator running Elite right on my Vista desktop:

Vice also emulates the Commodore VIC20, Commodore PET and various other 8 bit Commodore platforms. You can download it here.  Vice is free, there are other C64 emulators but this is the one to pick in my opinion.

So what of the other platforms ?  Well there are emulators available for:

• Sinclair Spectrum (various models.) Don’t know much about them, was never a big Spectrum fan. World Of Spectrum is an extensive resource detailing Spectrum emulation and also the Sinclair QL (a computer I know virtually nothing about.) Games to look out for are: Elite, Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, Head Over Heels and Atic Atac.
• BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. Never owned either of these (didn’t use one at school either like a lot of people did.) BeebEm seems to be the favoured emulator for BBC, and Elkulator for the Acorn Electron. Again, look out for Elite, and also Chuckie Egg.

This link will help you find emulators for MSX, Atari 8 bit, and pretty much any 8 bit computer system you can think of ….

Once you’ve got your emulator running, turn to Google to find the games …. Most of the 8 bit era games are pretty easy to find. If you can’t find what you’re looking for just drop us a line and if I can point you in the right direction I will !

Happy emulating !  I’ll be writing some more entries on emulation over the next few days.

Steve

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