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 (2200B/2200T and 2200VP), two different display controllers, the keyboard, a disk drive controller, and a printer. Programs can be loaded either 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 35x 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.
WangEmu runs natively under both Win32 (screenshot above) and Mac OS X (universal binary, OS X 10.4 and above) (screenshot) platforms. The cross platform support was aided greatly by the wxWidgets 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 2.8.9.
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
Here is the latest and greatest version of the emulator, 2.1. It was released in December, 2008. If you've downloaded an earlier version of the emulator, please see the release notes to see what has changed since 2.0.
Download WangEmu version 2.1 for OS X (4.6 MB; application and source)
Download WangEmu version 2.1 for Win32 (2.0 MB; application and source)
It turns out that the PC version of the WangEmu 2.1 depends on your system having the most recent MSVC (C compiler) runtime libraries installed. If you get a message that says something like:
This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect
It means your system doesn't have these libraries. You can install them by visiting Microsoft ( English, Deutsch, Español, Français), downloading the installer, and running it.
If you are running OS X 10.3 on a PPC machine, or if you are running Windows 9x or Windows ME, you'll need to use the release 2.0 of the emulator. Version 2.0 came out in June, 2005.
Download WangEmu version 2.0 for OS X (2.2 MB; OS X application and source)
Download WangEmu version 2.0 for Win32 (1.1 MB; Win32 application)
WangEmu 2.0 emulator source (363 KB)
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.