Wang 2200 Emulator

Although I have a working Wang 2200 computer, I have written an emulator so that other people who still have a fondness for the machine but don't have the time to hunt one down can have a bit of the experience anyway. The emulator contains a binary image of the Wang ROMs, and microinstructions are carried out cycle by cycle. All I/O operations get trapped and the addressed device emulates the appropriate response. Since it uses the actual microcode, the emulator is bug-for-bug compatible with a real machine.

The program currently emulates the first and second generation 2200 CPUs (2200T and 2200VP), two different display controllers, the keyboard, a disk drive controller, and a printer. Programs can be loaded either by loading them from a virtual disk, or by the "script" mechanism whereby files from the host system can be sent to the emulated computer as if they had been typed in very quickly.

Normally the emulator tries to run at a speed matching the original hardware no matter what the speed is of the host hardware. However, an unregulated mode exists where the emulator runs as fast as it can. An AMD Athlon 2800 CPU can run the 2200T CPU at 42x realtime, and the 2200VP CPU mode at 15x realtime. For programs that do a lot of screen output, the speed may be lower, depending on the graphics card used in the system. Another point of comparison: the emulator runs the 2200T mode at 6x realtime and 2200VP mode at 2.5x realtime on a 450 MHz G4 Powermac.

WangEmu runs natively under both Win32 (screenshot above) and Mac OS X (screenshot) platforms. The cross platform support was aided greatly by the wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) toolkit. If you download the sources and intend to build them for yourself, you'll also need to download the wxWidgets sources. The binaries below were built with wxWidgets release 2.6.1.

You might want to peruse these help topics to see a little more of the emulator:

MS Windows version:

• Menu system
• Configuring the Emulator
• Printer Configuration and Use
• Creating/Inspecting Virtual Disks
• Mapping the Wang keyboard
• Most Useful Disk BASIC Commands
• Scripts

Apple OS X version:

• Menu system
• Configuring the Emulator
• Printer Configuration and Use
• Creating/Inspecting Virtual Disks
• Mapping the Wang keyboard
• Most Useful Disk BASIC Commands
• Scripts

One of the useful features is that by double clicking on a line with an error code, a help window pops up with the full explanation.

Download the OS X emulator here (v2.0, 2.2 MB; OS X application and source)

Download the Win32 emulator here (v2.0, 1.1 MB; Win32 application)

Download the source here (v2.0, 363 KB)

Release Notes

Don't worry, there is no install program, no registry changes, or other hassles. Just unzip into the directory of your choice and away you go.