[vox] Emulation roundtable?

[Bill Kendrick]

I've been insanely busy & detached from LUGOD lately.  I finally scrubbed
the homepage calendar of events from last month (*embarassed*).

Our next meeting is already upon us, next Monday, August 19th!  Since we
don't have a speaker, I thought "what can I talk about?"  I thought of
some things, and shot myself down on most of them:

 * GIMP - Done it many times, but GIMP has changed a lot recently, and
   I'm not up-to-date with new features.  Plus, Akkana Peck spoke recently.

 * libSDL - Done it a few times, but SDL has changed a ton.  2.0 just came
   out, at long last.  I'm not up-to-date with it at all.  Talking about 1.2
   would probably be a disservice. :)

 * Tux Paint - Done it a few times, but nothing new has really happened
   with Tux Paint (worth doing a technical talk) in a few years.

Then I thought "well, I like Atari!"  So I thought perhaps I could do
a talk on Atari emulation under Linux.  Specifically, it'd be the systems
I care about: the 2600 (VCS) game console, and the 8-bit line of computers
(400/800/XL/XE).  I'm not into the ST/TT/Falcon, and know nothing about them.
I'm also not familiar with Atari arcade emulators (which wouldn't be legal
anyway), or emulators for the 7800 or Lynx game systems.

My perspective, as a Linux user, comes mostly from running Atari800 or
Stella emulator on a very casual basis, and using my Linux laptop's SD card
reader to load up disk images or binary executables (EXE files) for my
Atari 8-bit computer to boot into. :)

There's a lot more that can be done, including:
 * using a Linux system to act as a disk drive, which I no longer do
   (no serial port).  (As opposed to using an SD card + SD 'disk drive',
   which I currently use.)

 * cross-assembly, which I haven't done
   (shocking news: I don't actually do 6502 assembly!)

 * cross-compiling, which I haven't done
   (I've looked into cc65 now and then, but have very little
   experience beyond a "hello world"; I use BASIC or Action!
   (another high-level language) right on the Atari itself)

 * graphics & music tools, which I haven't really played with
   (most are for Windows, and would require, e.g., VirtualBox)


So with that, I could do a very short, cursory talk on what I do, and
what's out there (that I don't do yet).  But there are lots and lots of
old systems that can be emulated, so I'm thinking perhaps we can do
a "vintage computer emulation" roundtable...!


Would anyone else out here be game?

-- 
-bill!
Sent from my computer