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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Honestly emulators work better than the real thing 99% of the time, so I don't feel the need to play with flaky and dusty 30yr old hardware

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Yeah, but they don't emulate the smells, the sound of fans spinning up and the gentle breeze they generate, the beeps and boops, the tick tick tick hard drives make, the long travel of keys on that old keyboard with a slightly sticky shift (gotta be from that coffee I spilled in '97).

Game speed too.

Simh does.

I miss the scraping hard drive noises with a flickering “HDD” light and a mysterious “Turbo” indicator when my 90s PC had to work hard

Turbo was all about slowing down a 486-/Pentium-class machine to work with programs and some ISA cards that required a slower CPU and/or XT bus speeds.

wait... so turbo made it slower?

De-pressing turbo made the computer slower. Pressing it made the computer run at its normal speed.

Or that click of death that plagued zip drives.

My Dell had one in college. Everyone thought it was cool until the click-CLICK click-CLICK. Dell replaced it twice. Then I gave up. When did I ever really need to transfer 100MB anyway?

The click of death was transferrable via a disk having been damaged by a drive with the c-o-d, that's why 'replacing the drive' wasn't really a solution, you'd need to also throw all your zip disks and buy new.

Basically, it was a hardware virus.

Yes, but old computers also do not do that, because they no longer work. (And if they do, it's not with some 30 year old hard drive.) Maybe 80% of the working computers I have put on the shelf do not even boot after a few years. It's a fair question, I think. Maybe electronics just lose their spirit.

FS-UAE emulates even the floppy/HD head sounds and scrapping the media too.

These were all very nice, and reminiscent of the time

Then you remember you need to install Windows 9x or 2000 on it and the CD-ROM reader is kinda flaky, and you barely can download anything with IE 6, so now you would need an TLS bridge or use a usb-drive. Oh yeah and don't forget you need a small partition formatted on FAT32

Real hardware is still necessary to verify functional equivalency and correctness.

Also, there's no way you're going to emulate an interlaced or noninterlaced analog SVGA display, especially the sounds of mode changing, tearing, proper vsync, palette cycling, or setting the border color. Or MIDI music as it came from an AdLib, Roland, SB, or a GUS.

Some machines do not have emulators. Notably, most SGI workstations have custom hardware that's poorly documented and very complex.

As far as I'm aware of, there's also no functional Ultrasparc emulators -not that can emulate a late 90's/early 2000's Ultrasparc. The last time I looked at Qemu it wasn't quite there ("there" meaning able to run an arbitrary Solaris the way the original hardware could).

Call me when you can emulate that 30 year old solder smell, among other things.

I once made some rosin for soldering by dissolving the stuff made from tree sap for stringed instruments in isopropyl alcohol, and I think this is pretty close to the smell you're after. Fairly certain it's still not ideal to inhale the fumes from it, but it must be at least slightly less harmful than additionally vaporizing some heavy metals.

(This works reasonably well as flux for through hole sized components, possibly smaller if you're more skilled than I am, but you do have to clean up any excess afterwards because it's very sticky.)

Lead does not evaporate at the temperatures used for soldering.

Is that true, I have always heard that a tiny bit of lead is in the fumes. Either way I still think that one should avoid breathing soldering fumes as a general rule, no matter how pleasant they may smell.

>Either way I still think that one should avoid breathing soldering fumes as a general rule, no matter how pleasant they may smell.

Yes, but due to the flux. So lead-free solder fumes are not really safer (some say they're worse). The main danger with leaded solder is getting lead on your hands, which could get into your food if you aren't careful.

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