Emulation or the real thing?

Sometimes emulation is nice too. Otherwise you have to live with the design elegance of the IBM PC and the tactile response from an Atari 800 keyboard. (Actually the 800 is nice but the 400, XL, and XE machines have lousy key- boards.) But seriously, my view is that emulation has its place. I don't have the space for original hardware, so emulation lets me play with stuff I otherwise wouldn't be able to use. Sometimes it can improve on the original system by giving better debugging or snapshot saving or being faster. But I want to stress that emulation can only be a good *imitation* of the original hardware, and a lot of the nuances of using the hardware are totally missing from emulation. Often, emulation is a *bad* imitation of the hardware. So don't throw hardware away just because it can be emulated! -- Derek