Emaculation.com

Emaculation interviews emulator developers/maintainers

PCE/macplus: Hampa Hug

Q: Why did you start developing PCE?

A: What can I say? For the fun of it. I guess it's the same reason that grown men play with model railroads. And spend way too much time on it, too. ;-)

Q: What are your future plans for PCE? Emulating other processors as well? Adding additional hard ware support? As we are focusing on the emulation of Mac OS, we would be happy to receive some more in-depth info on that

A: PCE being a hobby, there's really no plan behind it. I have given some thought to emulating more machines, in particular the Mac II, but for now the focus is on completing what's already there. The two big missing things that I would like to add are proper IWM support and AppleTalk networking.

Q: Have you used other emulator source code to get started?

A: I have not used any other code in my project, but from time to time I have looked at other emulators, particularly vMac, for inspiration.

Q: What are the most difficult issues you encounter?

A: By far the most frustrating thing is lack of proper documentation. Around 1988 Apple stopped releasing any sort of useful information about their hardware and even some earlier stuff is not well documented (e.g. the IWM* or ADB*).

Hampa further lets us know that he is not “a particularly prolific writer (as the lack of documentation for PCE shows)”.=)

*Integrated Woz Machine, an interface chip for 3.5 inch floppy disks
*Apple Desktop Bus, an interface for peripherals

Emaculation thanks Hampa for the time taken to give some insight into the development process.

Cat_7

interviews.txt · Last modified: 2012/09/22 16:16