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Submitted by , posted on 02 September 2001
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Image Description, by
This is a screen shot of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator written in
Java. You can see it in action here:
http://home.austin.rr.com/razvans/projects/jzx/index.html
The Spectrum was built in the early 80's by Sir Clive Sinclair, in the
UK, and was one of the first truly personal computers (affordable and
reasonably powerful.) You can read more about the Spectrum here
and here.
I wrote the emulator in part because of my own personal nostalgia for
these machines (I got "into computers" because of them) and in part
because I was curious to see if it was possible to make one run fast
enough in Java. If you're a Java programmer, you may want to read a
small article I wrote up about this emulator:
http://home.austin.rr.com/razvans/projects/jzx/article/jzx.htm
I only tested the emulator on my machine (Windows 2000, Duron 700Mhz,
GeForce2 MX), using Netscape 4.78 and IE 5.01, with MS Jview 5.00.3802
and Sun JDK 1.3.1. On both JVMs, the emulator has to be slowed down
considerably in order to run at the speed of the original machine (Java
was surprisingly fast.) The code for the emulator was also remarkably
concise and very clean (I had previously worked on two Sinclair
emulators, written in C, and the code was rather messy and bloated.) I
never though I'd come to saying this, but this project has convinced me
further that Java is a solid platform and a great programming language.
I welcome your thoughts, comments and flames. :-)
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