Allison wrote: Besides, if you want noise, you could always add sounds. That's what I did with LisaEm. Whenever there's floppy reads, you hear the sounds of an actual 400K floppy drive spinning. I didn't add the sounds of the head seeks, mainly because they're inaudible except if you're really close to the drive, but certainly if you're going all out and emulating 5.25" or 8" floppy drives, where you can hear the head, you can always add those in too. Will cost you more in hardware as now you'll need a sound chip that's able to play back samples on your single board computer, but if you're willing to give up a parallel port, you could wire up a simple D/A converter via a resistor network. If you want more realism than that, you could always add some sort of optional failure mode where there's a 1/10000 chance of disk failure whenever you insert a disk, and have it wipe out an entire track or whatever, and make the appropriate noises. Wouldn't that be fun when you're trying do some work, or perhaps are trying to show how cool CP/M was to a group of kids you were trying to impress into looking at vintage hardware. :-) Even better, since you are on an emulator you could do something that was impossible - you could make a backup of the about-to-emulate-a-failure floppy for the user in the background, so once the fireworks are over, they can undo the damage. In real life, back in the day, you couldn't do that. Personally, that's one of the charms of emulators, you get away from the unreliability of the original hardware. (I'm not about to debate reliability of modern hardware, however, CF cards are certainly more robust than single floppies precisely because you can't harm them with a magnet, nor do they bend easily.) Sure, there are a lot of things in the experience you can't really emulate. These include the physical aspects of the hardware itself, you just can't touch the original machine in an emulator, nor its keyboard, nor feel the heat it gave off, nor the barely perceptible flicker, the curvature of the CRT, but sounds, failures, fonts, behavior can be easily emulated, if that's part of your goal. Most of the emulators I've seen don't care about those things, and they just barely give you the display output, and beeps, and not much more the experience of actually using the original machine. I think the goal of most emulator writers, myself excluded, is a) to say they've managed to build an emulator - this feeds into the whole emu-scene thing, and b) to get it going for software compatibility. Few actually have the goal of allowing the end user to experience the original machine. I do care about those things, so I took the trouble to add in sounds, and even simulate the blueish tint of so called black and white CRT phosphor. I would have simulated the curvature of the CRT, only after doing some experiments, it was horribly ugly and slow that it wasn't worth it. There are a lot of things I've skipped over, for example, when printing, I do simulate the output of an ImageWriter and it does look like dot-matrix output. I would eventually add some sort of animation of an actual imagewriter printer spitting stuff out and having playing realistic sounds (based on the data printed), but haven't do so yet. Yes, if we had holodeck like techonology where you could touch and feel old hardware and take it apart and mess with it virtually, I'm sure I'd be the first in line to build emulators in that environment, but you work with what you have available. Some folks here are against emulators because they feel it takes away Sure, if you're a vintage computing enthusiast, you want the real hardware, and you want it to work, but not everyone has the ability to keep big iron in their house, some even live in small apartments, and some of that hardware would cost a fortune in electricity to keep running - if you were to keep it running 24/7. I don't think these folks should be excluded from the fun and enjoyment of vintage computers just because they can't afford to obtain, maintain, repair, or store actual machines. While most of us would wish ebay prices weren't as insane as they are, they do tell an interesting truth: vintage hardware has a very finite supply. When there is a demand for it, the prices get insanely out of hand. Yes, there are crazy sellers out there selling machines for 10-100x what we think they should cost, however, what's crazy is that there are buyers at those prices, and that makes our hobby more expensive. Emulators are essentially free. While I do live in a house, I don't have the space to collect big iron. So I've artificially limited my collecting to mostly 8 bit home computers, and small workstations, and these live on shelving, most of the machines are plugged in and ready for me to work on whenever I want to. However, I do find myself firing up an emulator more often when one exists than the actual hardware. This is mostly so I don't unnecessarily wear it out old mechanical components such as floppy drives. As much as I hate to say it, eventually old machines will wear out and some of the custom parts will become unobtainable. In the Lisa, there are a lot of parts that can't be easily replaced. There are modern replacements for some of these, such as the X/Profile, or IDE:File, but for example the COP421 chip is really hard to get - the only source is Lisa leak all over your I/O board, this is likely one of the components that will fail. Yes, you can buy parts from VintageMicros, yes, you can get parts from another Lisa, for now. How about 5 years from now? 10? 20? 30? at what point will that last working Lisa fail and become irreparable? Replace Lisa with your specific favorite machine and reread this paragraph. I do have some, although limited electronics experience, so I can repair damage boards here and there, but I'm certainly not great at it, and I appreciate that this is a huge part of the enjoyment of old hardware. But, there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had from playing around with the software from these machine, and that's where emulators come in. So if you're just starting out, you could still experience a huge variety of vintage systems, at no cost, and no physical storage cost by downloading hundreds of emulators. Point in case, if you had the money, time and space, you could fill quite a large space with hundreds of arcade machines, repair the damaged ones, and clean up and restore them all, or for very little effort, you could download MAME, purchase some legal ROMs (or not) and perhaps for added realism build an arcade cabinet with real controls. Emulators also allow you to do something else too, they allow you to ask, "what if" - if you have the ability to add your own code in them. If you want to explore what might have been had a certain company not gone out of business, or if they had expanded on your favorite machine. You can add extra features to the machine that it never originally had. The simplest of these is unthrottling the CPU speed. But if you're so inclined, you can add color displays, or other hardware and explore it further provided you're willing to rewrite some of the underlying operating system, or you could even just look deep inside undocumented proprietary land and figure out how it actually works. This in itself is a hell of a lot of fun. (I prefer the term emulator over simulator. Simulator to me has a very specific meaning, and since emulators don't simulate the whole board at the transistor level, but rather emulate the behavior of the machine, to me, it's a better term.)