High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Hercules is a computer emulator which allows software designed for IBM mainframe computers (System/370, System/390, and zSeries/System z) and for plug compatible mainframes (such as Amdahl machines) to run on other types of computer hardware, notably on low-cost personal computers. Although there are other mainframe emulators which perform a similar function, Hercules is significant in that it enables private individuals to run mainframe computer software on their own personal computers. Hercules runs under multiple parent operating systems including Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X and is released under the open source software license QPL. It is analogous to Bochs and QEMU in that it emulates CPU instructions and select peripheral devices only. A vendor (or distributor) must still provide an operating system, and the user must install it. Hercules was notably the first mainframe emulator to incorporate 64-bit z/Architecture...