[Info-vax] Alpha emulator for OSX

[terry-groups at glaver.org]

On Sunday, February 7, 2016 at 8:17:08 PM UTC-5, IanD wrote:
> They may be changing things ? 
> 
> It seems the free product is discontinued and a personal and commercial one is in the works... 
> 
> The downloads section has no files listed at all

There has been a commercial one for a long time (perhaps since the beginning). It has been enhanced on a regular basis.

The free version's licensing / availability changed a couple times - it had been available for personal or commercial use. That changed to personal / non-commercial use only, and now (as you point out) it doesn't seem to be available at all.

Most of the other commercial emulators don't have a free version available either, so this seems to be the way that market is structured, unfortunately.

For AlphaVM, the commercial version is a rather different product. The free version is (was?) an instruction-by-instruction emulator, while the commercial version uses a variety of JIT (dynamic translation) processes for performance. The commercial one also includes many features not in the free version.

I don't know the reason behind discontinuing the free product, but since it was free and a different codebase from the commercial one, I can't see how it would be cost-effective to continue to offer it, taking time away from development of the commercial version to do more work on something that's given away for free.

In my case, if there hadn't been a free version of AlphaVM I wouldn't have investigated it enough to purchase the commercial version (I looked at a bunch of commercial emulators back-when and AlphaVM was the only one that had an easily-obtainable download - the other ones just had a "contact us for evaluation" link). But I'm not the typical customer for a commercial Alpha emulator - I use it for hobby / personal use.