Warajevo
by
Zeljko Juric and Samir Ribic
"We want to tell users of earlier releases of Warajevo ZX Spectrum emulator that although war in our country finished two years ago, the political and economical situation is still very bad. At the moment, our material status is much better than 2 years ago, but unfortunately this is not true for most of the inhabitants. However, we hope that these problems will be solved in due course. If this is your first contact with this program, a short story about the development of this program follows.

"Maybe this program is not too interesting in itself, but it is a fact that this program comes from Bosnia and Herzegovina, from the city of Sarajevo which has been surrounded for more than three years. Our names are Zeljko Juric and Samir Ribic. We are engineers of electronic and computer sciences (the emulator was originally Samir's graduate thesis). Even in our secondary school days, about ten years before, we began to build an interest in computers thanks to the ZX Spectrum. For this reason, we are a bit sentimentally tied with this computer. This computer reminds us of all of the times when, in our neighbourhoods, the life was nice and normal.

"However, when we bought AT 286 computers at the end of 1990, we did not forget our Spectrums. We had great interest when, in June 1991, we got a Spectrum emulator, which, without underestimating anybody's work, had very bad characteristics (it was slow, quite incompatible with the original machine, with unpractical emulation of the tape recorder etc.). It's origin is unknown to us (we suppose that the program is from the Slovenia Republic, and that the author is Peter Kroçelj), and when starting it displays the copyright message '(C) 1991. Roman & easy inc.'. When the war started in our country, we wanted to remove the dark thoughts from our heads as much as possible. So, in April 1993, we started the development of our Spectrum emulator, symbolically called 'Warajevo Spectrum emulator' which should have much better characteristics. We should mention that we were known as quite good programmers, especially in assembly language.

"The program was developed in horrible conditions. The grenades fell everywhere, there was little electrical power (at one time even the hospitals didn't have power for two months!). When we had electricity it was only for 2-3 hours during the night. However, we did not quit and caught every moment when the electricity was on to develop the program. It was often in an Army's camp, with an improvised generator, and a voltage that varied from 150 V to 300 V! The greatest part of ZXTOOLS (which was presented in the package until release 1.2, and later on was integrated into the environment) was developed without even a hard disc, because such a 'stable' voltage destroyed it. We progressed very well, and in November 1993, reading some newspapers that came from the enemy's territory, we got some information about the emulator 'Z80', written by Gerton Lunter. In even worse winter conditions we continued the development (in the rooms where we slept the water was frozen), hoping to get this emulator to compare our program and his program.

"In April 1994, the foundation Sorosh opened the first electronic mail in Sarajevo. We sent a general request and in June 1994, we got Lunter's emulator. From documentation we got information about many Spectrum emulators around Europe, but we thought that our program was surely better than all the others, except maybe Lunter's program. We think that it is a great success, considering the conditions where the program was developed and the quality of Gerton's program. When we contacted Gerton, he had the same opinion about it.

"Recently, a number of new emulators have appeared. Some of them are very good, especially X128 by James McKay, and there are a number of emulators for the Windows platform (We want to point out ZX32 by Vaggelis Kapartzianis and MultiMachine by Paul Hodgson). However, we think that Warajevo 2.5. is the best emulator for pure DOS. We want to tell you that the Warajevo emulator still does not have a good emulation of the video system like in the ZX32 emulator (although it is much better than in release 2.0. which was a considerable improvment itself over release 1.5.), perfect emulation of the bits 3 and 5 in the F register, emulation of the disc interfaces, Multiface 128, AMX mouse, full emulation of the RS232 socket or emulation of the Spectrum +3, which are supported in some other emulators. However, we want to emphasize that Warajevo is a Real-Time emulator (starting from release 2.0. - execution speed is equal to speed of the real Spectrum, independent of PC computer speed), and Warajevo still has a lot of features which make it unique."


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