Five OS emulators to put you in an alternate environment

Introduction

Emulators\r\nare among my favorite tech-related items to play around with during my free\r\ntime. Maybe it’s just me, but there is something cool about being able to run\r\nan alternate OS on your PC, especially when that alternate OS is something\r\nreally off the wall. Let’s take a look at five emulators old and new.

Note: This gallery is also available as an article.

DOSBox

One of the great things about DOSBox is that unlike many of\r\nthe other DOS emulators, it supports sound. Some of the old DOS games required\r\nyou to specify the IRQ, DMA, and base memory address of your sound card. DOSBox\r\nactually makes it possible to do that. The other thing I like about DOSBox is\r\nthat you can use hot keys to do things like capture sound, record a video, take\r\na screenshot, and change the emulator’s speed.

DOSBox\r\nis available as a free download.

Andy OS

The\r\nSetup wizard will download and install VirtualBox if it is not already present\r\non your system. In my case the setup process took a little while, but it was\r\ncompletely painless.

Mocha

There are two things I really like about this emulator. First,\r\nwhoever built it really got it right. The emulator is a faithful recreation of\r\nthe Color Computer 2 and its operating environment. The second thing I like about\r\nthis emulator is that it’s linked to a ton of free software, a lot of which are\r\ngames I used to play on my computer as a child.

Commodore 64 Emulator

CCS64 is free and is designed to run on top of Windows. It\r\ndoes a really good job of re-creating the Commodore 64 OS and even emulates\r\ndisk and tape drives. One of the coolest things about this emulator is that it\r\nsupports multi-player game play over the internet.

iPadian

iPadian re-creates the look and feel of an iOS environment,\r\nbut it isn’t a true iOS environment. In fact, even the apps that are found in\r\nthe free app store are mostly re-creations of popular apps rather than the real\r\nthing. The app store contains games such as Plants vs. Zombies 2, Clash of\r\nClans, and Cut the Rope. However, there are nowhere near as many apps as you\r\nwould find on a real iPad.

iPadian is probably best suited to those who want to try out\r\nsome of the more popular iOS apps but who don’t have a physical iOS device. It’s\r\nlimited, to say the least. But if you can accept those limitations, it’s not a\r\nbad program. You can download an ad-supported version of iPadian for free or\r\nyou can purchase the no-ad version for $5.00.