Bad Apple on an Apple //e: playing video on a stock 1 MHz Apple II [video]

The result is pretty great. I will enjoy the details.

For example if you want to run classic PowerPC Mac games with 3D graphics, you’re going to need an actual old Mac because no emulators currently implement enough of a GPU to run them.

Aside from that, with emulators you’re adding layers of indirection and modern technology with unavoidably higher overhead (like USB) that impact latency — even if emulated machines are faster in some ways they can be less responsive than actual hardware.

The best of both worlds are hardware recreations of classic machines using modern technology, but these are exceptionally rare. It’s a shame because with how much everything has shrunk, it’d probably be possible to build a meta-retro-box about the size of a NUC that contained hardware for a bunch of different systems.

For most development, emulation is great. That is what I do a lot of the time. Having my modern environment handy makes old school dev targets easy, fast and fun.

Sometimes, it makes sense to get real i/o and interaction. Here are a few examples:

* What are the performance differences between fast emulation modes, recently made CPU accelerator hardware, old accelerator hardware, and a stock machine?

That varies a lot! And emulation is not necessarily accurate. In the case of recent hardware option cards, it is not accurate at all.

There are times when it makes sense to test, or attempt something new, and doing it on the real machine is always valid. Emulation may or may not be, depending.

* I am making some low latency controllers for younger ones, and me to be honest, to game on and experience history.

Going down this road has been fun. I got a couple great CRTs, have made some gaming controller hardware, and my young ones notice! All sorts of questions, observations.

Dark room, late night phosphor trails, just by way of one small, but fun thing. They loved gaming that way. Have asked a few times to do it again. Fine by me.

* I want to program on a 65816, and that was an upgrade from back in the day I never did. My accelerator card could come with that CPU instead of a standard, 8 bit 6502 variant.

Emulation may cover this case, bit it may not do that accurately given newish hardware options I have on the machine.

* I do use the machine for the following:

Writing. Old school, comfy keyboard, display helps me to focus and write a bit differently. This is straight up creative writing and it is fun.

Electronics. Have always done this and will continue. A fused card amd ribbon cable makes learning and building fun. I can use the computer to generate inputs, display results, etc.

I got started with embedded systems this way and love doing it. Have learned a ton on an Apple, sometimes Atari machines back in the day. Still am.

Gaming, and for me that is Nox Archaist more than anything else. I don't have a ton of time, so I like to make it immersive and fun.

First time I sat down in front of one of these machines, actually a Plus model, not a //e Platinum, is an experience I remember vividly. Just last weekend I did that again, and we have come a long way!

That perspective is nice. Has value. I am happy it all can work still.

Edit: Frankly, a real system on a quality CRT is a great experience. Software emulation does not really do that well.

Hardware, FPGA can, and I bet it grows nicely over the next decade.

Software emulation, again, is my goto for dev projects. I do more than software on my retro hardware, so I maintain good quality retro hardware, and that leads me to the last reason:

Other people are making cool stuff! We all buy kit from each other and it is a lot of fun.

I'm currently repairing old HP calculators. All of those can be very accurately emulated even on my iPhone, but I did it for the challenge, for the learning experience, and really because I just like the feel of the keyboard and the unit itself--and the broken ones are much cheaper on eBay.

In the cases where an actual need is to be fulfilled, e.g. for business reasons (it happens), if an emulator works it can easily be the best possible way. If hardware is involved (including old disks), again it might not.

Well, most of them. My Interact draws characters pixel by pixel.

I'm a big retro computing enthusiast, and I'm not happy about the current state of abstractions (especially with web stuff), but there's definitely been advancements also.