How to install Salto emulator?
In this tutorial, we will see how to install Salto emulator. It is an emulator of Xerox Alto.
Installing
Linux
Salto is a very old piece of software, and does not compile on modern distributions. We suggest using ContrAlto emulator instead, especially on Linux. If you really want, you can install it in two ways:
- Build it on an old distribution running in a VM or container
- Run it using Wine
Building it on old distribution
I successfully built the Salto emulator on Ubuntu 14.04 distrobox. To build it, first we need to install some dependencies. On Ubuntu 14.04 you can install them using the following command:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2-dev flex bison
On other distributions, the packages should be similarly named. Then, you can clone the repo, and build it. Salto does not have any official repo, but there is a third-party one on GitHub. To stop it from getting lost, we also maintain a fork of it. We will use our fork here.
git clone https://github.com/InstallerLegacy/salto.git
cd salto
make
After it has finished compiling, move the entire salto folder to wherever you want to store it.
Wine
You can also run Salto using Wine. Since, there are many wine distributions and front-ends, we are not going to cover it. You are on your own. We recommend you to try ContrAlto emulator instead. If you really want to run Salto using Wine, see the Windows instructions below for some pointers.
Windows
You can download a zip file containing the emulator from Toasty Teach:
Move the extracted folder wherever you want to store it.
Now you can follow the VirtualHub tutorial which required this emulator.
Documentation
There isn't much documentation available.
Credits
- Toasty Tech for hosting the Windows version and writing excellent articles about the emulator.
- https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator for uploading the Salto source code on GitHub, of which our repo is a fork.
Video tutorial
Do you want to follow the tutorial by watching a video? We will post a video on our youtube channel soon.
Archives of this tutorial are available on Wayback Machine.
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