Hercules emulator
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| Original author(s) | Roger Bowler |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Jay Maynard, Jan Jaeger, David "Fish" Trout, Greg Smith, Bernard van der Helm, Ivan Warren, et allii |
| Initial release | 1999 |
| Stable release |
3.12 / November 30, 2015
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| Preview release |
4.00
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| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Emulator |
| License | Q Public License |
| Website |
www |
Hercules is a computer emulator allowing software written for IBM mainframe computers (System/370, System/390, and zSeries/System z) and for plug compatible mainframes (such as Amdahl machines) to run on other types of computer hardware, notably on low-cost personal computers.
Although there are other mainframe emulators performing a similar function, Hercules is significant in enabling private individuals to run mainframe computer software on their own personal computers.
Hercules runs under multiple parent operating systems including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X and is released under the open source software license QPL. It is analogous to Bochs and QEMU in that it emulates CPU instructions and select peripheral devices only. A vendor (or distributor) must still provide an operating system, and the user must install it. Hercules was notably the first mainframe emulator to incorporate 64-bit z/Architecture support, beating out commercial offerings.
Roger Bowler, a mainframe systems programmer, started development of the Hercules emulator in 1999.
The emulator is written almost entirely in C. Its developers ruled out using machine-specific assembly code to avoid problems with portability even though such code could significantly improve performance. There are two exceptions: Hercules uses hardware assists to provide inter-processor consistency when emulating multiple CPUs on SMP host systems, and Hercules uses assembler assists to convert between little-endian and big-endian data on platforms where the operating system provides such services and on x86/x86-64 processors.
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