MESS is awesome (and was praised in the article, btw) .. incidentally what was your obscure East-German home computer? I'm a huge fan of 8-bit emulation and am always interested in hearing stories from folks who return to their code from 30 years ago ..
These were KC85/3 and KC85/4, small and neat Z80 machines with 16 to 128 kByte RAM, and a BASIC interpreter and pretty nice 'modular' OS in ROM. Unlike later machines (like the KC Compact which was a CPC clone), the KC85/2 to /4 haven't been straight copies of western 8-bitters (the chips were Z80 bootlegs, but the actual system and OS were quite unique, similar in performance and capabilities to the ZX Spectrum, but better color resolution (you could give a block of 8x4 or 8x1 pixels one out of 16 fore- and background colors) and completely different OS.
Cool - thanks for the links, I'll check 'em out! Love to hear about these obscure systems. I was an Oric-1 user back in the day and am thoroughly enjoying its revival .. new stuff being made for it every few months!
