Hi all,
today I'd like to briefly share an activity from inbetween days: emulated emulation.
Maybe you know this situation: you set up all your programs, and are happy about how everything works. The you update your PC or a harddrive/SSD fails, or whatever ... and you start from scratch. All whole scratching your about all the little helper programs you installed over the time, all the adaption and so on. Like setting paths in some programs to some file or specific non-standard folder - whatever.
I got tired of it and therefore have finally decided to emulate my emulation environment. Having a nice Xeon (E5-2687) CPU makes it possible to dedicate enough CPU power to emulate an Amiga or C64 - or whatever legacy / retro system you like within an emulated environment. Luckily I also have more than enough RAM with my 64GB. I dont think I have to replace that system some time soon, even if its already ca. 6 years old.
The idea is to set upa virtual PC and then install everything in this virtual PC as you would on a normal one. So when you change the system you just need to set up the Virtua machine / the program for it and ready you are. The downside is you get a HUGE file on you HDD/SSD, like 70GB. I consider it worth it. As a bonus, I plan to keep this virtual machine running as long as all the programs in it support it. Meaning, I have a virtual Windows 7 in it. As long as e.g. WinUAE runs on Win7, there will be no need to change that. This makes it possible to add some legacy hardware available that wont have drivers for Windows 10.
Here are some pics.
I also have Acid64 installed, as I have a HardSID Play - that unfortuantely is defunct now but maybe I get another one.
Also I have the drivers for and the Kryoflux write program (Wildewutz).