Comment by mambodog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mambodog | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I hacked this together, though most of the credit should go to Hampa Hug's very nice emulator[0]. I'm posting this now as I saw the neat Windows emulator project and figured today was a good day to talk about emulation :)

My reasoning for putting this together is that I think it's really important for people to learn from what's come before, and the web is the most accessible place to do that. I've written a post[1] that goes into the rationale a bit further, and also addresses the legal aspect of this demo. Ultimately I would love for there to be an interactive online museum of personal computer history.

I'd also like to get a demo of NeXTSTEP working; for the OS which begat the world wide web to be running inside the browser would be pretty neat.

[0] http://www.hampa.ch/pce/

[1] http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser

Thanks, that's fantastic.

It's funny, I found it to be very emotionally evocative. I loved my IIci so, back in the day. The tinkering with the background images, recording everyone on the dorm hall making funny noises, replacing the system sounds, making the shutdown sound be HAL, etc.

It definitely helped that campus was pretty much all-Mac, so we all could tweak the same silly noises, and all try to find the joke that sounded silliest when told by the Talking Moose.

I don't have the same connection to my Mac these days. I wonder if it's just me, if the college freshmen have the same experience in 2013, or if it's somehow just an artifact of that particular era in computing.

Did you happen to go to Cornell?

Nope, aside from marching band road trips. Ithaca was too far away, for a PA kid. New Jersey was as far as I managed.

I would very much like to see a demo of NeXTSTEP working!

Wonderful job, but it would be nice to have (a) more interesting applications (e.g. MacPascal, HyperCard -- the full version not the Player) and also command-key support (it actually wigs out if you use command keys).

I was able to use Command-key shortcuts in MacPaint. (Firefox 21 on Linux). On a PC keyboard, Alt maps to Command and Control maps to Option.

Normally, the Windows key maps to Command and the Alt key maps to Option.

+1 I would love to see NeXTSTEP.

Awesome. I'd really love to see a JS alpha emulator so we can run OpenGenera in the browser.

Did you evaluate PCE against MESS [2]? Apparently some people involved with the MESS project have the Nextstep ROM images.

[2]: http://mess.org/faq

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