Emulation
If you never had a chance to play around with some of the real old skool hardware back in the day, and can’t afford to buy some old hardware off eBay (Sinclair ZX80s can fetch over $300USD for example) then emulation is probably your best shot. Personally, I love the feel of a real machine under my fingers - nothing beats responsiveness of a Sinclair keyboard! (Well… actually… everything beats the feel of a Sinclair membrane keyboard… But there is something to be said for hammering away on the real deal.)
A few days back I found a Sinclair ZX81 emulator online. This emulator is neat - it is written in Java and lives completely within a web page. You can even load and save your programs. There’s a reasonably good programming reference, just in case your Sinclair skillz are rusty and a nice collection of programs ready to try out. About the only things you’ll miss out on are trying to get the levels right on your cassette player so you can load the software, and the fun that comes with trying to tune your TV to the Sinclair signal… ;^)
August 25th, 2006 at 5:01 am
[...] While I personally prefer to use the real thing, it is smetimes handy to be able to fire up an emulator. I recently posted a link to a web-based ZX81 emulator, now it is the 64’s turn for the web-base emulation treatment. FC64 is an open source, Flash-based Commodore 64 emulator. It still needs a bit of work but looks pretty neat - a Commodore 64 in your browser! [...]