Computer Emulation In The Manner Of A Turducken

If you come from somewhere with a tradition of eating a meal of roast turkey or goose to celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, or other holidays, then maybe you’ve encountered the three-bird roast, or Turducken. A deboned duck is stuffed with a deboned chicken, and in turn the combination is stuffed into a turkey All the gaps are filled with sausage meat stuffing, and the resulting combination is roasted for a serious meat-fest. Vegetarians, please look away.

It’s something of an excess of poultry, but the three-bird roast is a delicacy that definitely works. We’re not so sure about the link that prompted this journey into celebration poultry dishes by reminding us of a turducken, but  we’ll leave the verdict to you the reader. Someone has created an unholy turducken-style chain of emulators that delivers a Sinclair ZX Spectrum on a Linux machine via Windows, DOS, and the Commodore 64. If it had its own word like the poultry dish it might be a Linwindoscomtrum, but let’s not go there.

The linwincomtrum in all its glory.
The linwindoscomtrum in all its glory.

So how have they done it? First, they took Lubuntu, and installed WINE. (OK, Wine Is Not an Emulator, we know that, but go with the story for a moment) Then they installed DOSBox under WINE for a DOS command prompt, and ran no$C64, a Commodore 64 emulator. On that they ran the c642spec Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator, and finally arrived in a ZX BASIC prompt.

The author does make the point at the start of the write-up that it’s a waste of ten minutes, but even though the result is an overly complex way to slowly emulate an archaic home computer on a modern one we’ll still give them ten out of ten for the effort.

Incidentally, the author does not identify themself and there is little clue in the form of the rest of the site to identify them, so unusually for a Hackaday piece we can not give credit where it is due. We do however salute the anonymous emulator pilot for their glorious folly.

If the ZX piques your interest, we’ve featured a coding tutorial for the rubber-keyed British micro in the past, as well as a later one having a tape-drive-ectomy, and of course the hellzxschreiber amateur radio Hellschreiber receiver.

Via Hacker News. ZX Spectrum image: Bill Bertram [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

39 thoughts on “Computer Emulation In The Manner Of A Turducken

      1. I’d want to do something more fun like plot the earth’s absolute path through space, then use it to synchronise and guide a few hundred telescopes in a synthetic superaperture scope to examine past path for all the time machines whose inventors forgot an important detail.

        1. That would be awesome. First determine earths position in our galaxy, then determine our galaxys position in the universe. A daunting task to be sure, but doable with some thought.

          1. Then you have the earths position *relative* to the universe and you can’t calculate an absolute position of the earth unless you can calculate an absolute position for the universe.

        2. Did a thought experiment on that years ago. Time travel can only be successful if the device is self supporting for the passenger, or thought is given to the location where you will end up once displaced. It would be necessary to move the passenger and device to the location intended on the date attempted. So I understand completely.

          Let me know if you work it out.

  1. So I decided to create a virtual world inhabited by these cleverly coded little AI beings and one of them I made to create his own little virtual world inhabited by these cleverly coded little AI beings and one of them he made to create his own little virtual world inhabited by these cleverly coded little AI beings and one of them he made to create his own little virtual world inhabited by these cleverly coded little AI beings and one of them he………

    I am now very suspicious of my own free will and the nature of my reality.

    1. Well if you were trying to be optimal, then you’d want to stack similar architectures on each other for best speed. Like you can have classic Mac, Atari ST, Amiga and palmos which are all 68xxx…. and I’m under the impression 68000 goes better on top of power PC than x86. OTOH z80 on x86 should be easy.

  2. I love it! Someone solved a real security problem, in a real public forum with emulators! This is brilliant! And to think of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent….damn man! This individual just solved the literal hundred million dollar question! Lol! That’s hilarious! =+)

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