I went through the period of nostalgia and fascination the author exhibits years ago with Amiga, c64 and dos emulation and virtual machines.
It's impressive and convenient that this runs in a browser, but does itreally change anything about emulation? We've had this capability for windows, mac and Linux for years which covers about every platform with a browser. I suppose it's convenient if you wanted to emulate windows 3.1 on your iOS device.
Emulators suffer from bitrot just like the software they're emulating. I've seen several fall into disrepair in recent years -- eventually we'll lose the people that remember how the the old systems worked. Centralizing the development and publishing it on the web seems a good way to keep the preservation effort humming.
(And as pointed out in the OP, getting something like Trumpet Winsock to work against a 21st century internet is non-trivial)
> We've had this capability for windows, mac and Linux for years which covers about every platform with a browser
Yes, but that always required installing emulation software, tracking down the necessary ROMs/disk images, etc. If it's running in the browser, the site admin can do all that once for everybody rather than every user having to do it for him/herself. All the user has to do is open a URL.
I think it is a shame that Java Web Start style tech never got anywhere. It pretty much delivered such experience (click url and app launches) without actually binding the application to the browser.
Comments
I went through the period of nostalgia and fascination the author exhibits years ago with Amiga, c64 and dos emulation and virtual machines.
It's impressive and convenient that this runs in a browser, but does itreally change anything about emulation? We've had this capability for windows, mac and Linux for years which covers about every platform with a browser. I suppose it's convenient if you wanted to emulate windows 3.1 on your iOS device.
Emulators suffer from bitrot just like the software they're emulating. I've seen several fall into disrepair in recent years -- eventually we'll lose the people that remember how the the old systems worked. Centralizing the development and publishing it on the web seems a good way to keep the preservation effort humming.
(And as pointed out in the OP, getting something like Trumpet Winsock to work against a 21st century internet is non-trivial)
> We've had this capability for windows, mac and Linux for years which covers about every platform with a browser
Yes, but that always required installing emulation software, tracking down the necessary ROMs/disk images, etc. If it's running in the browser, the site admin can do all that once for everybody rather than every user having to do it for him/herself. All the user has to do is open a URL.
I think it is a shame that Java Web Start style tech never got anywhere. It pretty much delivered such experience (click url and app launches) without actually binding the application to the browser.