A highly accurate emulator for vintage computers #Emulation #Gaming #VintageComouting #RetroComputing

Clock Signal (‘CLK’) is a latency-hating emulator of 8- and 16-bit platforms. A design goal is for users that seek the emulator to be invisible. Users directly launch classic software, avoiding the learning curves associated with emulators and with classic machines.

This emulator seeks to offer:

  • single-click load of any piece of source media for any supported platform;
  • with a heavy signal processing tilt for accurate reproduction of original outputs;
  • while minimizing latency.

The systems currently emulated are the Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC, Apple II/II+/IIe and early Macintosh, Atari 2600 and ST, ColecoVision, Enterprise 64/128, Commodore Vic-20 and Amiga, MSX 1, Oric 1/Atmos, Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum.

On the Mac it is a native Cocoa and Metal application; under Linux, BSD and other UNIXes and UNIX-alikes it uses OpenGL and can be built either with Qt or with SDL.

The display produced is an emulated CRT, with phosphor decay. Therefore if you have a 140Hz 4k monitor it can produce 140 distinct frames per second at 4k resolution. Latency is dictated by the host hardware, not the emulated machine or emulator.

Accuracy affects usability; the more accurate an emulator, the more likely that a user can run every piece of software they’re interested in without further intervention.

This emulator attempts cycle-accurate emulation of all supported machines. In some cases it succeeds.

See all the details in the GitHub repo. It’s under an MIT License.


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