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Emulators for Linux

By Anderson Silva


I spent a lot of time during the last few days searching, compiling, and fixing some emulators for some old classic platforms on my computer. One thing that I thought was interesting was that I found an emulator for all the video games platform, and some old computers I looked for available under Linux.

So, I decided to share with the rest of you a small list of links with the emulators I found this week. The emulators I have found were a Sega Genesis Emulator, an Atari Emulator, a Sega Master System Emulator, a MSX Emulator, and TRS80 Emulators all for Linux.

I just want to explain one thing, many of you probably already know that these emulators exist, but a lot of you don't. So, if you do know them, I appreciate you bearing with me, and if I say anything that you don't agree, please feel free to email me.

Here are the list of sites:

Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) - http://www.humboldt1.com/~ognir/dgen-sdl.html

dgen is the emulator for the Sega Genesis, and I have to tell you that I was pretty impressed with its speed and sound performance (it kicked MS Windows butt). Don't think I had any problems compiling it, and running it.

Sega Master System - http://www.komkon.org/fms/MG/

mg is the emulator for the Sega Master System, and you may only download the binary for its latest version. It works like a charm though.

Stella - http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bwmott/2600/

xstella is the emulator for the Atari System, it is also a very nice piece of software.

MSX - http://www.komkon.org/fms/fMSX/

fmsx is an emulator for the MSX Computer. The MSX computer was really big in Brazil in the 80's, and it was actually my first computer.... It brought back some memories. If you have never heard of it here in America (it did not do very well here, as far as I know), I am sure that there are people all over the world that had one of them. Anyway, fmsx is working fine, but I did have some problems compiling it. I had to disable sound to get a working binary.

TRS80 - http://members.aol.com/trs80emul/

xtrs is the emulator for TRS80 Model I and III, but I have not been able to run it successfully on my computer. I have tried both the RPMs, and compiling from my computer, and all it does it freezes my Xwindow. If you do get this baby to compile, please let me know, I would like to get it running sometime.

These emulators were very fun to find, compile and play with it a little, but I would strongly suggest you would read the warnings on some of the sites, since some of their parts, and games are copyrighted. I also want to thank every single programmer that was involved in the development of each emulator for Linux.

Just for a last point of reference, I am running these emulators on a AMD K6-2 400 Mhz, with 256 MB RAM and running RH Linux 6.1.


Copyright © 2000, Anderson Silva
Published in Issue 49 of Linux Gazette, January 2000


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