In celebration of the great home computers of the 1970s and 1980s the VMware Workstation team is providing support for the Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore PET, Commodore VIC 20, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Sinclair Z80 home computers within a VMware virtual machine. Imagine showing your friends and family the classic computers, operating systems, and applications of the past all while running on today’s modern hardware.
After extensive late night R&D effort, a proprietary 8-bit microprocessor hypervisor was created to run inside our existing x86 64-bit hypervisor to give you the double hypervisor – It’s like a double rainbow but better. In addition to the retro computer support the development team created the data cassette tape drive to MP3 converter so you can listen to your favorite games still on cassette as they are loading into the virtual machine. For the well-off consumer crowd the team developed a 5.25″ floppy disk drive and acoustic coupled modem to USB interface.
The retro computer support pack is coming to VM near you in the future. Once the retro support pack is released the Workstation team plans to work on the HAL 9000 and Skynet AI support pack.
Happy April 1st ; )
