The first time I heard the word ‘emulation’ in any context that I was familiar with was during the Amiga days. Back then there was a huge underground ‘scene’ that consisted of ninja bedroom coders who would try and push the capabilities of the machine further and further in form of ‘demos’, trying to out-do each other in the process. These usually consisted of a thumping trance soundtrack and involved a 3d polygon box spinning around, changing colours with the obligatory scrolling greetings message which included a taunt of sorts to ‘rival’ coders.

The demo scene was massive especially in the Scandinavian parts of Europe and Germany. Acquiring these disks wasn’t easy, you generally had to have some sort of ‘inside’ contact or use one of the readily available mail order Public domain companies.

My contact was Craig, a chap somewhat younger in years than ourselves but a ‘player’ all the less and one that could provide us with these disks. As the content of the demos became more varied, disks based of the 8 bit Commodore 64 soon appeared. These were replaced the thumping techno with a ‘SID’ tune accompanying a scrolling message using the 64 font.

And then programs claiming to allow you to run 8 bit software appeared in the back pages of Amiga Power. They didn't use the word emulator back then - I was intrigued and consequently sent off the readies. What turned up was a couple of floppies with a program on one and a small selection of ‘classic’ games on the other.

The standard of emulation though was piss poor - the visuals looked the part but invariably the games ran at about 50% of the original speed. The thing is, despite the woeful performance I was hooked. Soon I was sending off for more game packs. This was the future, I mean only several years before my software collection on the 8-bit consisted of what I could afford and what I could copy at the computer club. Suddenly I was presented with a colossal world of games, readily available for a small price. The ability to boot up lost classics on my Amiga was something that gripped me instantly.

Soon the Spectrum was emulated and, given I’d never owned a real machine, I was now able to own and enjoy these games that I had only read about for a fraction of the real price.

Unfortunately the quality of these emulators on the 16 bit never did evolve and soon my interest waned, only being able to play Knight Lore at about 75% of normal speed soon diluted the interest.

Before long I’d accepted that perfect emulation of these machines just wasn’t possibly and I’d fully embraced the 16 bit computers and consoles and thought no more of them...

March 2008

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