Who can tell me about emulators?

What I need is an Acorn Archimedes and a BBC Micro. What I don’t want is their large bulk taking up space in the house. I have been told that there are such things called emulators which should allow me to run my existing PC as though it was one of the above machines.

Can this be done? If so how does it work?

Please bear in mind that I am an IT luddite so break it down for me please 🙂

Thanks

You want arculator
http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/download.html

and B-EM you do.
http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/

Just small software programs that you download for free and install on your computer. They may be a bit buggy and run at funny speeds. It may also be a struggle getting programs in and out of them. There’s usually some well established methods but they can sometimes be a bit techy.

I had a Spectrum emulator on my last notebook. It was all very easy.

I got bored of playing The Hobbit even quicker 2nd time round 😉

I’ve always used BeebEm and it’s worked fine with everything I’ve used it with (games and old basic progs).

Free from here: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/

Thanks guys, I’ll have a look at those and see if I can make them work…

I will probably be back with lots more questions haha!

I downloaded a Manic Miner emlulator onto my laptop. What provided hours of entertainment ad a kid, quickly turned into half an hour of boredom as an adult

couldn’t get it to work. I keep getting a message that it can’t find ROM files or something.

I’ll try again another night…

Zedsdead – what do you NEED an emulator for? Most people I know who have used emulators do so for ‘fun’ or some weird geeky obsession. If you are not an uber-geek, then I can’t imagine “needing” an emulator.

The only possible reason I can imagine is someone wrote some code 20+ years ago which you now need to run. If you have the source code its probably easier to port this into a 21st century language / platform than get it to work on an emulator. If you don’t have the source code, good luck getting it onto the emulator, and I’d spend my time looking to see if there is an off the shelf tool available to do what you want – very few problems which were being solved in those days are unique…