Hercules (Emulator)

Hercules is an open source emulator that allows IBM mainframes System/360, System/370, System/390, or System z to emulate on different systems. It run all operating systems that have been written for these processors.

The emulator has nothing to do with HGC (Hercules Graphics Card), an old graphics card.

In the practical application is the latest operating system that can be used on Hercules by amateurs, MVS 3.8 from the eighties. Later versions of operating systems are licensed to certain processors and may not be installed on Hercules why. However, it is well known that IBM internal " ThinkPad " Notebooks with installed z / OS uses.

The company IBM has also released called Redbooks, which describe the installation of mainframe operating systems on notebooks with the FLEX -ES program of the company fundamentals Software Inc.. This is a commercial product, which is also able to emulate IBM mainframe systems on personal computers.

Limitations: Because various internals are and Sysplex Coupling Facility unpublished in parallel, the corresponding functionality can not be implemented.

Hercules is freely available and is subject to the Q Public License. For beginners there is a distribution with a pre-generated system ( Tur ( n ) key system ) with JES2 and TSO available. As a substitute for the licensed ISPF RPF is installed.

Meanwhile, there are also, through the supplied documentation addition, documentation and scripts that facilitate the daily work with Hercules. Many users set a Hercules with current operating systems, the IBM to evaluate different scenarios.

For emulation on a Windows system, a Telnet Tn3270 program as well as numerous libraries are needed.