Bonjour tout le monde ! The barrels of nostalgia strike back on Mac OS X…
KEGS is an Apple IIgs emulator originally developed for HP-UX by Kent Dickey (thus its name Kent's Emulated GS) and since then was made available to various UNIX-based platforms. The present version uses SDL, a cross-platform library designed to make it easy to write multi-media software, implemented in KEGS 0.61 by Frédéric Devernay. This is a port to the Cocoa environment with a lot of optimization done for "l'Emulateur-ki-tue", both on the source code and in Cocoa integration.
As all versions, it has its own history. Back in April 2002, the first port was done in Paris, France by Benoît Dardelet as a programming challenge with the source code made available by Frédéric Devernay. For him, it was his first work on this new environment and he could not develop it further a long time... Poorly written, very buggy and definitely not Mac friendly !
Then Benoît contacted Darrell Walisser, the one who made the most of the SDL library on Mac OS (just try GLTRon to see) to help him with the code and SDL integration. Funny enough, both of them each worked on one side of the Atlantic in order to make the code ready, but they didn't know more about each other (wonderful Internet !). Darrell was working on the very deep part of the code while Benoît was working the MacOS integration.
A first beta was released on July, the 15th after the Bastille Day break, to some beta-testers who replied to be interested on comp.emulators.apple2. Some came to contact us and provided wonderful advices and tricks. At the same time, Frédéric Devernay included all the tricks Benoît and Darrell made into the official KEGS version (well, most of them, some OSes are limited…). During the summer of 2002, many versions appeared, each trying to make the emulator a little more bug-free and adding some of the wonderful tricks of the Cocoa environment.
Then at the end of August 2002, Gilles Tschopp from Switzerland (it seems this country has a special gift for making IIgs emulators !) came in contact with us. He did previously XGS-DOS and knew a lot about Apple IIgs emulation (just look on this site). Together, these three mates could fix heaps of problems by "emulating on the metal" and put this website to life for the French Apple Expo of September 2002.
For the New Year 2003, the three main versions of KEGS were merged into an unified core code. This major achievement allows the emulator to gain power and to take advantages of all available strengths. At the same time, KEGS for Mac OSX became KEGS-OSX and Kent came back with a new version of his emulator. More opportunities to explore for a endlessly story.
The rest is history…