An interesting development in vintage system emulators

I (re-)discovered a remarkable tool last week, which absorbed a day and a bit. Even if you're not interested in the ZX Spectrum, I think it's worth a look. It's called BASin. There's no good homepage for it, alas. The current "official" one is here but it contains little content: http://sites.google.com/site/pauldunn/ There's also a blog: http://zxdunny.wordpress.com/ You can download it here (although v14c is not a very current version): http://www.worldofspectrum.org/emulators.html The latest stable version I've been able to find mention of is 14d - you can see a record of its deletion in the site activity page of the GooglePages site. I've not managed to find a download of it, though. There was an experimental build, 15.6, which I found a download of somewhere - just the binary, no installer or other resources. Past the EXE on top of the EXE of an installed copy of 14c and it works, though. A little more (obsolete) info: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sinclair/msg/4eeb4ffc8725beec?pli=1 Essentially, it's a Spectrum emulator for Windows, reworked so that the display and the BASIC editor are 2 separate windows. One is a proper native Sinclair display, with attribute clash and all the other horrors that make Speccy fans nostalgic. The other is a Windows window, in which you get a 128K Spectrum-style editor - typed keywords rather than arcane keystrokes to enter keywords in a single keypress, but with modern Windows niceties: cut & paste, a ruler, a syntax helper, bracket matching, error messages as dialogue boxes with verbose text, line-by-line execution tracing, variable checkpoints, etc. etc. You can set the speed of the emulator, so you need not wait hours to see what a real 3.5MHz Spectrum would do - you can run stuff at an emulated 55MHz (on my PC) to see if it works, then slow it down to real speed to see what genuine hardware would do. The Help file contains the entire Sinclair manual turned into a modern hyperlinked Help system, along with program help. You can zoom the display, change the fonts used in the editor and so on. Files can be loaded and saved into the native Windows filesystem using the menus, but the emulator can still handle cassette-tape images and so on. It is a really pleasant environment to work in: you get the pleasure of working in the old environment, but also the facilities of Windows. It may not encompass all the very best of both worlds, but it is the closest I've ever seen. I really like the way it merges the fun of playing around with an emulated 1980s 8-bit environment with the luxuries of a modern GUI OS. Trying to write code with an emulated Spectrum brings back many of the horrors of working on those machines for real - lousy editors, tiny screens, poor file-storage, instability, slowness, etc. It strikes me that there's no need for this concept to be limited to the Spectrum, although that happens to be my favourite 8-bit machine & the one I'm far and away most familiar with. It would be an interesting way for emulators of almost any vintage system to develop - separating display and code editor, enhancing the editor with modern native-OS facilities while keeping the classic execution and display environment. It might be a little less applicable to text-only terminal-based OSs, but not exclusively so, I think. I'd love to see such an environment for a whole load of the old graphics-oriented 8-bit home computers of the 1980s, though. I'm sure some people would consider it heresy to pollute a classic platform with modernities, but it strikes me as a really productive blending. I'm going to try to resurrect some of my unfinished Speccy projects that were just too painful to try to finish on the original machine. By the way, although it's a Windows 32-bit binary, it runs fine on Windows 7 64-bit, under XP in VirtualBox on Linux, and stably if a bit slowly under WINE on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508