I am something of a nerd when it comes to old computers, and especially old software. Various house moves and eBay clearouts have inevitably depleted my physical computer collection to a couple of laptops and a PDA or two, but in terms of software it's all present and correct, going back thirty years.

- Sinclair ZX80 emulator with my first 6-line 'program'? Check.
- O-level Computer Science programming project painstakingly transferred from audio cassette onto a BBC Micro emulator? Check.
- That lousy space invaders clone I never finished writing for the Commodore Amiga? Check.
- Pretty much every game I've ever owned, on every platform? Oh yes.

The unassuming laptop sitting in front of me contains emulators for all of the above and more, but as the years go by it becomes harder to maintain this historic (to me) and worthless (to everyone else) collection of old code.

Just last month a Windows update broke my copy of Outcast and it took some serious finagling to fix it. Three hours of work for a game I probably only play for three hours a year? If I didn't enjoy problem-solving so much...

Computers move on. My Computer Science O-level project was written on a BBC Model B, and the PC import process, using a personal stereo with a 5-band graphic equaliser to try to compensate for the magnetic degradation the tape had suffered, was not an easy task. Particularly as the final blocks were irretrievable and I had to learn, or re-learn, the DFS filing codes to fix it with a hex editor. I did that ten years ago; I doubt it would be possible today as the conversion software written back then would be annihilated by the exponentially faster clock speeds of today's computers. And anyway, I've forgotten how.

Emulators and virtual machines can help, and I'm particularly keen on the open-source DOSBox, without which many of my computer-related memories would long since have bitten the dust. If anything those old games run better now than they did back then on real hardware.

But eventually something has to give. In some cases I'm already running emulators within emulators (Psion 3a within DOSBox, EPOC within Virtual PC, etc.). The mental overhead involved in keeping this eclectic mix of emulated hardware running almost spoils the pleasure of occasionally booting up Xenon on the Amiga, Chuckie Egg on the ZX Spectrum, Citadel on the Beeb, Metroid 2 on the Gameboy, Asteroids on MAME and Duke Nukem in DOS.

Almost... but not quite.

Tags: zx spectrum amiga ebay chuckie egg dosbox bbc micro windows virtual pc personal digital assistant