Because bleeding eyes are a bad thing, I’ll try to explain why emulators are so cool.
- Emulators reduce a computer to two things: a program (the emulator) and a file (the “image” or drive). That’s all that’s required, and this becomes very easy to move around. I’ve got three computers at home, a laptop at work, and Christine has a desktop and a laptop. I could be working on any of those physical machines. Emulation lets me take “My Computer” and run it on any of those machines – all my files, all my settings, everything, on whichever machine I happen to be using.
- Emulators make it easy to set up many purpose-built machines. For example, there’s a thread on the WordPress forums about setting up a test/development environment on Windows to play with. Some of the tools are quite nice, bit I want to develop on a Linux environment since my host‘s servers are Linux. With emulation, I can easily set this up and run.
- Ever been bitten by a virus? Not sure about the program you’re installing? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a clean, easy way to back up your computer? Now you can! An emulated computer is a single file. Make a copy – heck, make five – and you’ve just backed up an entire computer.
I could go on, but I hope this gives you a flavor of why this is so damn cool.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Are you loading those header images from your home machine? They’re going slow as heck.
Yes. Still in beta.
Yeah, the whole thing still makes my eyes bleed – and I first saw systems like that back in the mid-90s.
That reminds me, I need to start reading my CSS book soon…
How are emulators set up? Do you install an OS, burn an image of it, reformat and repeat above setps for however many OS’s you have? Then just install the emulator program, and pick an OS image throught it?