A 8 MHz Atari is sometimes a bit slow especially in the ZX81 fast mode. 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. 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. (Donkey kong-clone 'Krazy Kong' on the ZX81 emulator) The rest is explained in the German manual but you can easily work it out for yourself. But there is a help screen which shows an image of a real ZX81 and after a while you know the most important keys. A bit unusual for the average Atari user are the key definitions because they are identical with a real ZX81. The emulator runs on all Atari computers including Falcon and TT in the resolutions ST medium and ST/TT high. There was no video chip - the cpu had to do this task.Ĭhristoph Zwerschke programmed the only ZX81 emulator. Equipped with 1 KByte ram, a strange but very cheap keyboard and a Z80A cpu with 3.25 MHz.

The ZX81 was published in 1981 by the British computer manufacturer Sinclair. Let us begin with a real legend, a computer which sold more than a million and still has a lot of fans. The latter part should be very interesting for interested C programmers. 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. You will also find some info about the lost emulators like the FalconSpeed 486SX - I try to give an answer what happened to them. In this article I don't want to describe the known PC and Mac emulators but the freeware/shareware emulators which are widely available. Most of the hardware emulators were overrun by the fast technical development and the manufacturers didn't publish advanced versions of their emulators. Sad but true: The great hardware emulator days are over. Those emulators used hardware extensions to be as compatible as possible to give you access to the majority of non-Atari software. 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. If you read about emulators in Atari magazines today you will usually read about MagicMac, TOS2Win and PaCifiST.

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