The Amiga 500 lives again — in Google’s browser. Google developer Christian Stefansen resurrected a version of the computer system from the 1980s in the form of a Web app that runs in Chrome. Forty-year-olds who want to relive their childhoods or younger people who want to see just how hard their elders had it can visit the Amiga 500 emulator for Chrome online, boot the machine, and play some games.
The Native Client technology runs software written to run on a particular processor at close to the speeds that native software runs. The approach gives software more direct access to a computer’s hardware , but it also adds security restrictions to prevent people from downloading malware from the Web that would take advantage of that power.
The original port to Native Client was done in four days, however, there was a lot of polishing afterwards, taking at least four times as long as the original port.-Christian Stefansen
The big questions for Native Client is whether programmers will adopt it and whether other browser developers will reverse their opposition. With NaCl today, there’s a Google-specific part of the Web available through the Chrome Web Store, but those apps won’t necessarily work on other browsers. Mozilla prefers a different approach for bringing older C software to the browser, a technology called asm.js that uses JavaScript technology that’s universally supported in browsers.
Running C code on Native Client requires some modifications and therefore developer time.
