Apple IIGS emulator

Here I expose myself as a computer nerd.

In my posting from earlier in the week, I gave a link to a site where you can play Oregon Trail on an Apple emulator. On the same site are other disk images you can load on the emulator. I've spent some time this week trying some of them out. I had played some of these games when I was a kid, and I must say, back in the good old days, computer games weren't very good.

Because of limited graphics capabilities (a whole 6 colors at 280x180 resolution on the Apple ][+), a lot of the games were primarily text based. Sound effects consisted of bleeps and bloops that were sometimes strung together in a vague and annoying semblance of music. And everything was... so... slow.

As for the emulator itself, I commend the good work of its developers. It really is just like using an Apple II computer -- with a few exceptions. As with all emulators of this type, I/O is a problem. It's simple enough to make virtual registers and address spaces and to execute instructions just like a real processor. But interfacing the emulator to real hardware -- such as monitor, mouse, keyboard, and sound card -- is a bit more challenging. For instance, the Apple ][+ keyboard worked differently than today's standard keyboard, so when you play some of the games through the emulator, you need to hold the shift key down.