GameBase (Play Wii GameCube PS2 N64 GBA NDS PS PSP DreamCast SNES MD and Other Over 20 Consoles) Emulated PSP, NDS, N64, SNES, GBA, NES, GBC, PCE, Genesis, GB, SMS, 2600, NGP, MSX, MSX 2 games on you Android Devices.In 2017 I went up to Seattle for PAX as usual, and while I was up there I heard about the Living Computer Museum, an institution in southern Seattle founded by Paul Allen to preserve PC history. Make sure to come by the museum soon to see what other cartridges you can load. From The Internet Archive, which has one of the largest libraries of vintage computer hardware and software, the Commodore 64 emulator and games linked below will let you relive many of your treasured 8-bit games like Burger Time and Frogger.Ray Borrill & The Data Domain. Old Computer Book Gallery Old 1970s Toy Catalogs Questbusters, the Adventurers Journal. Fall’s busy video game release season buried me, and while I eventually transcribed a full hour of audio and wrote the story, it seemed weird to run it six or eight months after the fact—so it just sat on my hard drive.Apple II Programmer's Reference in a Mac Emulator.
We put a chair.” I toured Seattle’s Living Computer Museum for over an hour with Executive Director Lath Carlson, but it’s that one simple line that stuck with me most—a perfect encapsulation of what makes the Living Computer Museum special.Housed in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood, the Living Computer Museum doesn’t look like much from the outside—it’s cleaner and a bit brighter than the surrounding warehouses, but those who know Seattle know that’s also not saying much. Living history“Other museums put a glass in front of their computers. I hope you’ll enjoy this look into the museum though, both its public-facing side and the enormous support operation it necessitates, and thanks to Paul Allen for his role in founding such a wonderful institution. What started as a bit of nostalgia for him, a PDP-10 in a nondescript Seattle warehouse, is now one of the best computer museums I’ve ever been to, a truly special place where visitors can go hands-on with everything from a CDC 6500 to an Apple I to a Xerox Alto.Some of the details may have changed in the last 14 months—I don’t, for instance, know whether the museum’s gotten its CRAY-2 up and running yet. And then he put it up on the internet for people to remote login—you may have heard of PDPPlanet.com.“What happened was they put the website out there, started getting users, and then people would call and say ‘Can I come see the computer?’” says Carlson. Around 15 years ago now, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought this PDP-10, the same model he and Bill Gates used in their earliest years. IDG / Hayden DingmanThe PDP-10, I should say. We’re standing in a bright white room filled with a CDC 6500, a Xerox Sigma 9, an IBM System/360 Model 30, and most importantly, a PDP-10. Even the supercomputers.“The museum actually started kind of backwards from most museums,” says Carlson, shouting over the noise of about a half-dozen mainframes. It was half-dismantled when I saw it, recently scrubbed free of 20-odd years of mold damage. One, an IBM 360-30, was found in a basement in North Carolina. At the Living Computer Museum you can get your hands on the world’s third-ever supercomputer, one that helped study both nuclear physics and the structure of the cold virus, and which has less compute power than the phone in your pocket.Carlson talks me through the history of some other machines. “Then Paul basically said ‘Okay, enough people are interested, maybe it should be a museum.’”An original CDC 6500 module (right) versus the Living Computer Museum’s reverse-engineered version (left).A ton of work, but at the end? The CDC 6500 runs. It takes forever.But past that are the minis, some of which are more special than others. There’s a PDP-8 nearby, this one for visitors to play chess against. As with any relic, computers carry a piece of everyone who’s ever touched them.Outside the mainframe room, things start looking more familiar—at least to me. As someone who grew up after the mainframe era though, there’s a weird connection that forms from touching those old keyboards, like reaching through to a far-flung past. The Alto’s running Maze War, either the original first-person shooter or close to it. Then past that is a Xerox Alto, the machine Steve Jobs “borrowed” from when making the Macintosh. “They’ve all been here and seen it and they go ‘Oh yeah, I drew that arrow on there’ or ‘Oh yeah, he had me wire in that one thing.’”Most of the collection is hands-on though, including another Apple I—“It’s the only regularly operating Apple I in the world and we let people use it,” says Carlson. Apple’s HR department put his stuff up for grabs, “And this engineer that worked there, Don Hutmacher, kind of wandered over there, took a bag of Starbucks coffee and that computer off the shelf.” It sat in Hutmatcher’s workshop for 30 years until he passed away in 2015, at which point his family worked with the museum to establish the machine’s history.”It was modified in some way by the first four employees of Apple,” says Carlson. He didn’t take anything with him,” says Carlson. “In ‘85 when Steve was forced out of Apple he left and literally left everything in his office. The museum, as I said, takes up two floors. I absolutely urge you to go see it, but I’d also love to give you a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors, since Carlson was kind enough to allow me back there.In short: A lot. As you head into the Apple II era, there are cases full of floppy disks nearby, then in the Windows 95 era that transitions to CDs.The Living Computer Museum’s museum is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg though. In the mainframe era that can mean booting up Oregon Trail for instance. There’s an Apple II, a Commodore 64, a TRS-80, a collection of Windows 95 machines, a NeXT Cube—even an Apple III, which Carlson calls a “really horrible machine,” continuing “We’re constantly struggling to have software to run on it.”That’s another part of the Living Computer Museum’s magic: Using these machines means having the software to take advantage of them. Continuing on, every era is represented. Carlson chatters as we walk. It’s dark up here, and everywhere you look there’s more stuff. IDG / Hayden DingmanFloor-to-ceiling shelves stretch on and on and on, barely enough room to walk comfortably between them. Then we go up another flight of stairs and suddenly I’m in the warehouse where they stored the Ark of the Covenant. Best dolphin emulator for macHere are punch cards.” Carlson pauses. Oscilloscopes…” It’s about half stuff that’s been donated, half Paul Allen’s private collection, at least up here.Further down you enter the software archives, “Everything from more modern machines and Atari and all kinds of things like that to games that are on paper tape. We have over 3,000 ICs (integrated circuits) in our collection, so you need a particular chip for something we probably have it. We have entire bins of mice from different eras, cables. Final cut pro video editor for macThe engineers have to pull these all the time. Carlson takes me through a few shelves’ worth of schematics. We have a couple-year backlog generally.” IDG / Hayden DingmanThe racks continue. Ii Emulator Computer Museum Cracked Open AndThat’s because an engineer came down here and stole parts out of it for another machine. “A lot of the machines you’ll see down these rows are kind of cracked open and guts spilling out a bit. And that’s in addition to, Carlson tells me, “an offsite facility where we store the machines that are less likely to run.” IDG / Hayden DingmanOne of many rows of partially-cannibalized mainframe machines under the facility.”A lot of it is spare parts,” says Carlson. Old warehouse, right? If the upstairs was the warehouse from the Ark of the Covenant, this is…well, that times two—15,000 square feet of mainframe machines, in various states of repair. There are bins full of magazines, including back issues of PCWorld.And then we head down to the basement, courtesy of a rickety-feeling service elevator. It’s not like they’re just going into that drawer and sitting forever.” There are VHS tapes, and file folders full of training materials from defunct companies.
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