John D. Mitchell's Blog

Games Archives

JPC: x86 Emulator on the JVM

Okay, I must be slipping... I can't believe that I've either totally missed this or completely forgotten about it:

At each JavaOne, I end up asking lots of people what, if anything, they've seen that's particularly cool, interesting, etc. This year, I was chatting with Cliff and he mentioned JPC -- an open-source emulator for x86 code.

JPC is written Java and so you can run all sorts of old DOS programs on any machine that supports the JVM. This includes a lot of old DOS games. [And now I feel old for playing too many of them when they were new.]

Hmm... I wonder if I can find some old GEOS disks and get it installed and running. :-)

Java Quake

Bytonic Software has released their open-source (GPL'd) Java port of the Quake2 game engine, Jake2 v0.9.1.

Lego kills Mindstorms

Yahoo news reports that Lego is going to kill off the geekily popular Lego Mindstorms.

Basically, Lego, as an organization, just never learned to adapt to the high-paced world of high-tech toys. Heck, they didn't get the whole trend / tie-in toy market either. So, they lost a lot of money and now their going to try to deal with the consequences by retreating back into their old, core market.

Hmm... Anybody interested in creating a venture to take over that market and do things the seriously fun, geek way?

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