The Computers category gathers home and professional micro-computers, from the 8-bit machines of the early 1980s to the 16/32-bit workstations of the end of the decade. It is the most diverse category of the wiki: the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, the Amigas and the Atari ST, the Japanese MSX, the Thomson MO/TO used in French schools, the Sharp X68000 and its arcade conversions, and of course DOS with its thousands of PC games.
Emulating a computer is not quite like emulating a console. Many of these machines boot into a BASIC interpreter and expect a typed command to load a game from tape or floppy; loading can take a while, exactly as it did back then. A keyboard — physical or virtual — is therefore often useful, sometimes mandatory. Multi-disk games are grouped in a .m3u file listing the disks in order, which lets you swap floppies without leaving the game. Each system page details the procedure, the accepted extensions and the BIOS files, if any.
New in Recalbox 10.1: two machines join the list, the Philips P2000T and the Exelvision EXL 100 — the latter with exel-hence, a core written specifically for Recalbox. On the emulator side: libretro-eightyone for the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, libretro-rb5000 for the VG 5000, libretro-sugarbox2 for the Amstrad CPC, libretro-amiberry (experimental) and libretro-puae-2021 for the Amigas, which also gain
.hdfhard-disk support and direct launching of.lhagames.
| System | Manufacturer | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Acorn BBC Micro | Acorn | 1981 |
| Amiga 1200 (AGA) | Commodore | 1992 |
| Amiga 600 (ECS/OCS) | Commodore | 1992 |
| Amstrad CPC | Amstrad | 1984 |
| Apple II | Apple | 1977 |
| Apple IIGS | Apple | 1986 |
| Apple Macintosh | Apple | 1984 |
| Atari 8-bit | Atari | 1979 |
| Atari ST | Atari | 1985 |
| Commodore 64 | Commodore | 1982 |
| Commodore VIC-20 | Commodore | 1980 |
| DOS (x86) | IBM | 1981 |
| Dragon 32/64 | Dragon Data | 1982 |
| Elektronika BK | Elektronika | 1984 |
| Exelvision EXL 100 | Exelvision | 1984 |
| MSX turbo R | Microsoft / ASCII | 1990 |
| MSX1 | Microsoft / ASCII | 1983 |
| MSX2 | Microsoft / ASCII | 1985 |
| NEC PC-88 | NEC | 1981 |
| NEC PC-98 | NEC | 1982 |
| Oric / Atmos | Tangerine | 1984 |
| Philips P2000T | Philips | 1980 |
| Philips VG 5000 | Philips | 1984 |
| SAM Coupé | MGT | 1989 |
| Sharp X1 | Sharp | 1982 |
| Sharp X68000 | Sharp | 1987 |
| Spectravideo SV-318 | Spectravideo | 1983 |
| Texas Instruments TI-99/4A | Texas Instruments | 1981 |
| Thomson MO/TO | Thomson | 1982 |
| TRS-80 Color Computer | Tandy | 1980 |
| Videopac+ G7400 | Philips | 1983 |
| ZX Spectrum | Sinclair | 1982 |
| ZX81 | Sinclair | 1981 |
Emulator availability depends on your machine: the most demanding cores (Macintosh, PC-98, X68000, DOS) are not built for every board. The availability table is on each system page, and emulator compatibility gives the overall picture.
Your floppies, tapes and disk images go into the rom folder of the matching system, under /recalbox/share/roms/. If you play computer games regularly, a real USB or Bluetooth keyboard attached to the machine makes all the difference — most of these games were designed around one.