If you read about emulators in Atari magazines today you will usually read about MagicMac, TOS2Win and PaCifiST. But the Atari world was different five years ago: the Macintosh emulator Spectre GCR and various PC emulators made it possible to turn your Atari to a Mac or PC. Those emulators used hardware extensions to be as compatible as possible to give you access to the majority of non-Atari software.

Sad but true: The great hardware emulator days are over. Most of the hardware emulators were overrun by the fast technical development and the manufacturers didn't publish advanced versions of their emulators. In this article I don't want to describe the known PC and Mac emulators but the freeware/shareware emulators which are widely available. You will also find some info about the lost emulators like the FalconSpeed 486SX - I try to give an answer what happened to them. After that, you will find two emulators for the Atari XL and last but not least portable emulators which run on the Linux operating system. The latter part should be very interesting for interested C programmers.

Let us begin with a real legend, a computer which sold more than a million and still has a lot of fans...

Sinclair ZX81

The ZX81 was published in 1981 by the British computer manufacturer Sinclair. Equipped with 1 KByte ram, a strange but very cheap keyboard and a Z80A cpu with 3.25 MHz. There was no video chip - the cpu had to do this task.

Christoph Zwerschke programmed the only ZX81 emulator. The emulator runs on all Atari computers including Falcon and TT in the resolutions ST medium and ST/TT high. A bit unusual for the average Atari user are the key definitions because they are identical with a real ZX81. But there is a help screen which shows an image of a real ZX81 and after a while you know the most important keys. The rest is explained in the German manual but you can easily work it out for yourself.

(Donkey kong-clone "Krazy Kong" on the ZX81 emulator)

There are only very few programs that won't run on the emulator - mainly games which make use the high resolution graphics, the sound (available as a hardware extension for the ZX81) and the printer. The emulator has many advantages: You can assign joystick functions to the keyboard (very important for games), start programs via the file selector and adjust the emulation speed. A 8 MHz Atari is sometimes a bit slow especially in the ZX81 fast mode. With a MegaSTE you have original speed and the TT/Falcon turn the emulated ZX81 into a real fast arcade machine. The speed and the joystick definition can be saved together with the program (but the files are still compatible with a real ZX81).

There are a lot of ZX81 programs supplied with the emulator.

Rating

This emulator does a great job. The only thing I would like is for it to implemented in a real GEM environment. The latest version is 2.1 - make sure that's the one you get - most FTP servers have only the older 1.x versions. The URL below is a direct download of version 2.1.

Sinclair ZX-Spectrum

The successor of the ZX81 with high resolution colour graphics (256*192, 8/16 colours), a one channel beeper and the famous rubber keyboard.

There are two ZX Spectrum emulators for the Atari ST: ZX-Spectrum v2.07 (short: ZX-Sp) and Speccy.

ZX-Sp 2.07 by Christian Gandler is the best of these two and is nearly as perfect as the ZX81 emulator although the Spectrum is much harder to emulate. There is a 68000 version and a 68030 version. The latter one is faster and has additional features like blinking. The installation is via a simple setup program. Once the emulator has started you will see the

(The legendary Tempest)

Spectrum BASIC prompt. The insert key will lead you to the control dialog which offers a wide variety of options. One of the most important options is the ability to load snapshots. These snapshots have nothing to do with the screen. In this case they hold a copy of a program and are used by nearly all Spectrum emulators. That's why you will find tons of snapshot files on FTP servers. ZX-Sp is able to load snapshots with the extension SNA or SNX but converters for other snapshot formats are supplied with the emulator.

(An early game of Jeff Minter: Headbanger's Heaven)

This emulator also supports joysticks. As there were several joystick interfaces for the Spectrum, ZX-Sp emulates different joystick interfaces including Kempston and Interface-1.

ZX-Sp is real fun because everything is like on an original Spectrum! The games are running with their original speed on a Falcon and even an old ST is fast enough to play action games. Compatibility is very high and so you can take a look at e.g. Jeff Minter's first (strange) games or play the original Tempest with this emulator.

There is only one real disadvantage: ZX-Sp emulates a 48 KByte Spectrum. Programs, which were written for the 128 KByte Spectrum won't work on the emulator.

Rating

Don't miss this emulator - it offers you a chance to play games which are now being rereleased with the '2000' suffix.

If you are clicking through the internet you may find a version with a translated manual. The original 2.07 archive has only a German manual and the translated version is only ZX-Sp 1.0 with a real bad German-to-English translation.

(Configuration screen of Speccy)

Speccy is not very popular - maybe because it is forbidden to publish it via PD libraries. This emulator is also good and understands basic and assembler programs. Compared to ZX-Sp you will notice that Speccy is not as comfortable, doesn't support snapshots and is not so compatible. The emulator also crashes from time to time. There is only one advantage: Speccy is smaller and so a bit easier to use. Since the last version is from 1990 there seems to be no further development. A program to transfer Spectrum programs to the ST is supplied with Speccy. All programs and manual in the Speccy package are in German language.

Rumours say that there was a third Spectrum emulator but this one was never published. On some web pages you will find an emulator called SPECTRUM but this one is only the version 1.x of Zx-Sp together with a bad translated manual.