#59: Emulation of things past

A black box with a keyboard

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Many people of a certain age (men, mostly?) may have spent a good amount of time over the holiday season indulging in a recherche du temps perdu, harking back to their own childhood or teenage years. Late in 2024, a company called Retro Games brought out a faithful-looking £90 / $100 replica of the 1982 Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The “Speccy” was the first home computer in the UK to really take off; worldwide and across several iterations, it went on to sell 5 million units, way before the advent of home PCs or modern gaming consoles (apart from the earlier cartridge types like the Atari 2600). More importantly, the Spectrum was hugely influential in launching careers of thousands of technologists who got their first taste of the computing world at the hands of its dead-flesh rubbery keyboard. They even made a film about it.

This new machine dubbed “The Spectrum” differs from the original in a number of key ways – powered through a USB-C port and with HDMI output to a modern display in place of the old RF out to a portable telly, and it comes with 48 built-in, licensed original Spectrum games to enjoy. But it looks and feels very similar to the original – making erstwhile fans somewhat weak at the knees.

Pump the garish, blocky colours and frankly horrific opening-screen soundtrack to Manic Miner through a big TV and you might wonder what the fuss was all about, but persevere and you might recall just how fiendishly addictive and difficult some of these games were. There’s even a “CRT mode” to make the graphics a bit more blurry for extra vintage feel.

A video game with a red background

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You can add other games via the huge archive at World Of Spectrum, by copying them to a USB stick. Thankfully, most of the programs will start in a blink of an eye rather than the several tedious minutes of loading from a finicky tape player. It’s amazing what clever programmers could do in 48K of RAM; that the image of Eugene’s Lair above is 4 times the size of the whole of the Manic Miner game.

The Spectrum starts up in a kind of home screen allowing for easy selection of what you want to run, though for true Old Skool vibes, you can revert to the original blank screen / BASIC programming UI..

A screen shot of a computer

Hardware

The original ZX Spectrum had a total of 64K of memory (16K reserved for the system, hence why 48K was available for use) and used an 8-bit Zilog Z80A processor running at 3.5MHz. The Spectrum is based around an ARM chip (isn’t everything?) and emulates the original Z80 and the custom silicon chip (the ULA) which hung it all together.

An emulator basically translates – in real time – between the environment the software thinks it should be running in, and the hardware which is actually available today. It’s not unlike reading a book in a foreign language, translating each word into English by looking it up in the dictionary then figuring out if the phrasing of the sentence needs to be rearranged… all in real time.

Emulation used to be seen as a poor way of building compatibility as it is quite expensive in compute terms, as the resulting programs will be slower than they would be otherwise. When Apple moved the Mac from its original Motorola 68000 architecture to PowerPC, a built-in emulator made sure that most old programs would still run, and even though they were slower than if they had been developed for PowerPC, the fact that the new machine was more powerful than the old, made up the difference. In this kind of instance, it is translating one radically different hardware architecture to another.

Another good example is how Microsoft allowed the Xbox One to be able to run Xbox 360 games, even though Xbox One was based on an Intel chip and Xbox 360 on PowerPC. Since the Xbox basically runs each game in a custom version of its own operating system, every “backward compatible” game needs to have a package built specifically to emulate not just the 360 hardware but the version of the OS that it would normally expect.

There are a list of Xbox 360 and even Xbox Original games (the OG ones are mostly Star Wars ones, tbf), and in some cases they have been enhanced to take advantage of later hardware; the game thinks it’s talking to an Xbox 360 and asking it to draw graphics at HD resolution, but on a Series X it could be up-frame-rated and upscaled to 4K.

A video game screen with an object and a couple of buses

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Run on your existing device

The romance of “The Spectrum” is really all in the classic package; in reality, you can run a free Spectrum emulator and all of its software on your phone, PC, Mac, build your own on a Raspberry Pi or even run in a browser.

A screenshot of a video game

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Since most of the games for early consoles and computers were either ripping off an arcade game (see Hungry Horace vs Pac-Man) or were licensed versions which were nothing like as capable, what about emulating the original arcade machines on modern hardware?

MAME

Originally “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator”, the MAME project set out to build an emulator platform that could take on any number of arcade machines from the 1970s – 90s and maybe beyond. Since arcade games were essentially bespoke hardware in the early days, there’s a lot to do to emulate whatever processor and other chips each one might have come with, but again, modern computing is way beyond what a mid-1980s arcade machine could muster. MAME is an open-source emulator platform which aims to be able to preserve any kind of old computer and its software.

Find out more about MAME; there are even ports to run in a browser too, so you can relive the original Space Invaders in your morning coffee break.

A screenshot of a video game

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667 – Good Game, Good Game

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Gaming is big business. There’s a story that gaming is bigger than Hollywood, though that depends what you include and what you don’t. Like TV and cinema, the gaming industry has faced transformational changes to its traditional model. The days of buying a game in a store, taking it home and playing it for days or months, before it gathers dust on a shelf or is passed to a new owner, are largely over. Mobile gaming, digital delivery, pay-for addons and subscription services are the new world.

Games consoles are typically subsidized by their maker, using the razor blade economics model of selling the device at a loss but making that back by charging a little extra on every game. Add to that the move to online services as a way of making money to help keep the cost of the hardware low.

Sometimes that hardware cost can bite – like the clip_image004feared Red Ring of Death which affected the Xbox 360 console about 15 years ago; the action to extend warranties on Xbox consoles and to swiftly replace failed ones cost Microsoft over $1B (nearly a quarter of which was FedEx charges for the free shipping to and fro) but probably saved the Xbox brand from irreparable damage, thanks in part to swift decision making by SteveB.

Other costly mis-steps are all over the gaming industry – like a film studio releasing a bad movie, sometimes successful tech companies back track from their entertainment plans, like Google shuttering its cloud-streaming Stadia service or Atari literally burying unsold stock. There was even a documentary about that one.

But let’s not get down on history and failure; the future’s bright! Maybe virtual reality will be the next big thing, just as 3D Television was for home entertainment.

The Xbox 360 went on to be a successful platform, and many of its games are still played today, as the weird hardware of the 360 can be emulated on the more powerful Xbox One and its successor Xbox Series S and Series X. Some of the old games can even be upgraded by the new consoles, running in 4K and with a higher frame rate than the originals.

Back in the present, the Xbox Game Pass subscription service (sometimes referred to as like Netflix for video games) continues to evolve and grow; new titles released include the Nintendo 64 classic given a 4K reboot, Goldeneye 007, and Age of Empires II has made the surprisingly successful leap from PC to console too.

Game Pass is available for Xbox consoles, for PC games, or in the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate combo which includes both PC and console games.

Check out TechRadar for some tips on finding special deals.

606 – Cloudy Horizons

clip_image002As the Holiday Season starts to loom (though some retailers’ tasteful décor has been in the aisles since late August), technology fans’ thoughts turn to Black Friday and the inevitable gift flinging that follows. The Global Pandemic™ and its spin-off, The Supply Chain Nightmare®, has dealt a shortage of what uninformed pundits refer to as “computer chips” amongst many other issues.

This means that even if big ships weren’t in the wrong place and there was anyone left to drive the containerloads of toot they ordinarily carry, the actual goods themselves might be in shorter supply than expected. All sorts of consumer electronics from gadgets to motor cars have been affected by shortfall in capacity at silicon fabs.

If you haven’t got your planned-for Xbox Series X console yet, then good luck in finding any in stock – there are numerous twitter accounts and stock scraping websites out there which might help, assuming you don’t want to get scalped on eBay. Maybe you’ll need to stick with what you have already and just wait until 2022 to get the top spec console, or settle for a Series S in the meantime.

Good news for all Xbox console gamers, though – the latest release in the mammoth Forza series has arrived.

Originally a racing simulation franchise to rival the PlayStation’s Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport appealed to driving sim types, but Forza Horizon – a more arcade-style driving game which has you hooning around an open world in all kinds of exotic cars – has reached a far wider audience. Set in Mexico (or a fictionalized variant thereof), FH5 has hit the ground running with over 1 million gamers already.

Forza Horizon 5 is available for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series S / X. Already available on Xbox Game Pass, it can be downloaded free with the right subscription, though it might take a while to complete the installation…

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If you can’t wait to play it (or you just fancy a quick try without spending all day installing it), why not run it from the cloud instead?

clip_image006The smoothness of the graphics probably won’t be quite as good as having it locally, but with Game Pass Ultimate you can try the streaming experience which has been in beta for a while now. Cloud Gaming is available on Apple, Android and Windows devices.

Simply plug in an Xbox controller via USB or connect via Bluetooth, and your device will be the front end to the game which is actually running in an Azure datacenter, on one of many Xbox Series X blades.

Even modest spec PCs like the original Surface Go can cut a credible job for a little Friday night entertainment.

604 – Empire and Pass

clip_image002The Xbox console is nearly 20 years old. Launched at Toys R Us (remember them?) in NYC in mid-November 2001, the first generation console (originally referred to as the “DirectX Box” after the PC graphics technology) later made its way to Japan and Europe in early 2002.

The companion Xbox Live gaming service arrived in 2002, and set the high-bar for online and multi-player gaming services alongside the original console and its online and multi-player-enabled games. The Xbox Live Gold service was threatened with a price increase earlier this year, though that was quickly walked back; commentary at the time was that Microsoft was trying to make XBL Gold less attractive in order to push people to using the newer and more comprehensive (also, more expensive) Xbox Game Pass offering.

Game Pass Ultimate is a superset of Xbox Live Gold – and includes access to lots of games as part of the subscription, akin to getting movies through a Netflix subscription rather than buying or renting individual titles. In January 2021, Microsoft said there were 18 million Game Pass subscribers, with the number likely to be a good bit higher now. Different Game Pass levels are aimed at PC games fans or Xbox games, or both – starting at £1 for a month’s trial, up to £10.99 a month for the full kahuna, which includes XBL Gold and both PC & console games.

This week sees the launch of the latest edition of one of the biggest PC games from the 1990s; Age of Empires. Originally released in 1997, the civilization-building strategy game was hugely popular and kept growing through community-provided expansion packs and “mods”, despite sporadic attention from Microsoft directly. If you played the original, you’ll probably remember the Priest who could turn an enemy into a friend, or recall losing hours being absorbed in the minutiae of building farms, training soldiers and waging war on your neighbours.

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Well, the franchise is being rebooted, in a clear signal that the PC is still considered a major gaming platform. Leading the 20-year celebration of Xbox with a flurry of both PC and console game launches, is Age of Empires IV.

The new release has a variety of clip_image005campaigns from the Roman Empire to Moscow, Mongolia and Genghis Khan to Joan of Arc. If you’ve already got a Game Pass, and If you fancy whiling away some of the weekend stuck in the past, you’d be well advised to start the installation soon – it can take a very long time to download and install. Wololo!