NEVER HEARD OF IT. What is an emulator?

: NEVER HEARD OF IT. What is an emulator?
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Hi James -

An emulator is a software program that makes your computer behave like something that it is not. For example, you can install a Commodore C64 emulator on your IBM type computer. Now you can load C64 programs into the emulator and run them on your IBM just as they would run on a C64. The emulator works by translating each C64 machine language code into a series of IBM processor codes that will do the same thing. The emulator also works at a higher level. Another example: The C64 program might have a small series of instructions that calls a routine in the C64's bios to print a character to the screen. The emulator translates these instructions to work with the IBM bios.

Hope this helps....

: : NEVER HEARD OF IT. What is an emulator?
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: :
: Hi James -
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: An emulator is a software program that makes your computer behave like something that it is not. For example, you can install a Commodore C64 emulator on your IBM type computer. Now you can load C64 programs into the emulator and run them on your IBM just as they would run on a C64. The emulator works by translating each C64 machine language code into a series of IBM processor codes that will do the same thing. The emulator also works at a higher level. Another example: The C64 program might have a small series of instructions that calls a routine in the C64's bios to print a character to the screen. The emulator translates these instructions to work with the IBM bios.
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: Hope this helps....
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Ok... so could I run windows applications on a Linux OS? Or is this more of a hardware thing?

: Ok... so could I run windows applications on a Linux OS? Or is this more of a hardware thing?
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In theory; yes, you could run windows apps in a windows emulator running on Linux, if a windows emulator existed. But, you probably wouldn't want to. GUI (Windows) OS's are extremely slow compared to command-driven OS's like MS-DOS or Comodore's Basic OS so running Windows apps in an emulator would slow them to a snails pace. Most people who want to run both Linux and Windows apps create two different bootable partitions on their hard drive, one for each OS. Either operating system is able to directly access the same hardware in the x86 machine, unlike the Commodore OS in an x86 based machine which would require an emulator to indirectly access the hardware. The speed loss caused by the emulator disecting each of the Commodore's 6510 microprocessor instruction is not important because todays x86 processors run so much faster than the old 6510 processor.

However, there ARE Windows and DOS emulators for Linux...

: However, there ARE Windows and DOS emulators for Linux...
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like wine at www.winehq.com

: Ok... so could I run windows applications on a Linux OS?

Yes, what you need for that is Wine.
Have a look at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Emulators/Targets/PC/Wine/

: NEVER HEARD OF IT. What is an emulator?
: Basically, an emulator is a software program used by end-users or the people needing access to a mainframe computer. The basic structure of an emulator is for the first part it emulates or copies specific functions of a terminal. When copying the function of a terminal it then gains access to a mainframe computer supported by the terminal.

: : Ok... so could I run windows applications on a Linux OS? Or is this more of a hardware thing?
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: In theory; yes, you could run windows apps in a windows emulator running on Linux, if a windows emulator existed. But, you probably wouldn't want to...

Hi!

I don't know about how well it works in Linux, but I've used a Win 95 emulator in SCO UNIX, and it worked great. I expected it to be slow, unresponsive, problem-filled, but it was not.

Everything I tried worked well, even the PC-to-UNIX file conversion, which was automatic.

I didn't try multi-user Windows (i.e. running Windows on more than one workstation at a time) because the system was set up with dumb serial terminals. But I did run multiple Windows users at the console, and it worked fine.

Melissa

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