Setting up an Einstein emulator has always meant assembling the pieces yourself: MAME, the ROM, a folder of disc images, and a good memory for which key does what. The Tatung Einstein Emulator and Development Environment does all of that once, for everyone.
MAME wrapped in the ES-DE front end with a TatungBytes theme. You pick a machine, TC01 or 256, then a category, and the software runs. Around 400 titles are built in across games, adventures, applications, board games, educational titles, strategy games and ports, each with cover art and screenshots, many with video. Every game in the Games section has joystick control, including titles that never offered it on the original machine. The manuals, reference books and every issue of the Einstein User Magazine we hold are in there too, opened from the same screen as the software they describe.
This is the part that took the work. MAME deliberately refuses to save changes to a disc image, which is fine for playing games and useless for writing programs. The package gets round it: each programming tool boots with a boot disc, a writable application disc and two work discs, so what you save is still there next time. A Recovery option resets an application disc to its original state without touching your work discs, and a Disk Conversion option turns your modified discs into standard .dsk files for a Gotek drive in a real Einstein.
It is 6.6 GB and Windows only, and you will need four free programs first: MAME, the ES-DE portable front end, Python 3 and Adobe Reader. The included guide walks through installing each one and extracting the package's eight zip files into the right places. Follow the folder names exactly and it works; once set up, the whole thing is portable and can live on a USB stick. This is a first release, so if something misbehaves, tell us which title through the Contact page.
