Tech Sense: August 2026

Odds and Ends

I am on vacation this so I offer a collection of technology odds and ends for this month’s column. I guess I could call it, “Rockets, VMs, and Emulators”.

Reusable Rockets

I am in Florida and had the chance to watch the Falcon 9 rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral. The Falcon 9 is built by SpaceX and is powered on a mix of liquid oxygen and kerosene. The Falcon provides a measure of reusability as the first of two stages returns and lands either near its launch pad or on a barge out in the ocean. The second stage continues to orbit and is designed to fall back to earth and burn up in the atmosphere during the return. The Falcon Heavy uses two side boosters which can both be recovered landing on barges or nearby landing pad.

Blue Origin also demonstrated its ability to land and recover the primary stage of its New Glenn rocket and China also recently demonstrated a recoverable rocket. The Chinese catches the first stage in a net floating on a barge. The new SpaceX rocket under development is designed to return the first stage called the “Super Heavy” and catch it in what they call “chop sticks”. Also, it is expected to be able to safely return the rest of the vehicle safely to earth as well.

When the Space Shuttle was built it was also designed to be reusable and much of it was, but the cost to refurbish the reusable parts was too much to be practical. So why is everyone looking to create reusable rockets? It’s because it significantly reduces the cost to send things to space. This makes it practical to put 10,000 satellite constellations into orbit and do more science and support multiple space stations and more.

Virtual Machines and Emulators

I enjoy playing computer games. I still like to play games that I have owned for decades, like Civilization 2. These games were designed to run on Windows 95 and do not run on the current versions of Windows. My solution is to run them on a Virtual Machine (VM). A VM is software that emulates hardware allowing this virtual hardware to run its own software and operating systems. On a VM installed onto my computer I can install Windows 95, or Windows 98, or Windows XP for example and run my older games. I can also run a virtual Windows 11 on a Linux system with a VM that supporting the virtual hardware required.

A virtual machine typically runs on physical hardware, like your computer. I can (and do sometimes) run Linux on a VM running on my Windows computer or run Windows on my Linux computer. I also sometimes run 3 or 4 virtual machines on the same physical machine all at the same time. I also pay for services allowing me to rent VM services on the “cloud” and build and test things like new websites.

But what if I want to play a game from the old days of the Commodore 64? VMs typically run on a physical machine whose hardware is close to the VM that is being emulated. An emulator will emulate the hardware directly in software. This works will for older and slower hardware like emulating the 6510 CPU of a Commodore 64 that runs at a 1 MHz speed on a modern Core I7 running at 4 GHz (about 4000 times faster). A Commodore emulator would also need to emulate all of the other chips in the Commodore including the sound, the graphics, the ROMS, and any peripherals needed like a floppy drive. Doing this allows the VM host to provide a truly virtual Commodore 64.

Emulation has been successfully used to emulate many devices like game consoles, arcade video games, and even pinball machines. MAME (the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) is software that provide emulations for more than 10,000 old arcade machines. It is free and open-source software but, the game ROMs need to be acquired legally. The ROMs are the code that juns the games.

More Notes

There are a few good VMs that can be downloaded freely. I have used VirtualBox from Oracle for many years and is available for both Linux and Windows. Windows includes Hyper-V if you are using Windows Pro.

Until next time

I hope you all have a great rest of your summer.