Real Amigas, WinUAE, VirtualPCs: Journey of a twisted mind.

[JimC]

I figure General Discussion is the best place for this.
First off I just want to say that this board looks to me to be the great balance between the WinUAE and Real Amiga users.. both seem to be equally valid here which makes this a great place.
Also, please forgive me for the long post and occasional typo... I should be sleeping.
The purpose of this post is to illustrate my train of thought and perception in regards to Amigas.. emulation and such, merely to see if others feel the same.

Ok... it used to be in the past that I felt that WinUAE was(is) great, but I feel that obviously nothing beats the real thing, which is why I always have my A2000/A3000 at the ready. I used WinUAE for testing games to see if they were worth xferring to my 3000 for regular use. Then my father-in-law gave my wife his laptop, I in turn got hers, which is a nice one except that the screen is busted and needs a monitor (yes, there IS a point to this!). Anyhow, My closet is getting full, so I figured I'd setup the monitor on my small, cramped desk and hook the A3000 to it and the laptop when needed. I did so reluctantly storing my C= monitor th the closet (I LOVE those scanlines!) WB looks great! Games look like PC games, now I can live with it, though, it IS amiga!
On the XP laptop, I setup a stripped-down install of XP and replaced the shell with WinUAE/config that autostarts, Amiga bootscreen as XP boots, almost as if it is an amiga. It's nice and I get to use a nice RTG/Picasso desktop and when I run WHDLoad games, I get scanlines!
I've started to use the WinUAE install more often than my 3000..though it's on the desk, staring at me! I am at odds with how I should feel about this! Any opinions? Ok, next point!

I really have been getting into AROS lately, I have natively installed it on several PC's in testing. The issue I have is Practicality (that's a word, right?) I don't have space for all these systems running!(My wife would kill me,too) So, I run AROS on the Laptop under VirtualPC/VMware. Then I got to thinking... Virtual environments are more prevalent nowadays with people running multiple versions of Windows, Linux, now AROS, if you will. Now the brain sees these things as just running a virtual environment, just booting Win98, etc. This to me seems to be blurring the lines between emulation and real hardware. It makes me think, OK, this puts WinUAE in a different perspective, although it is the same as it ever was. Just an Amiga compatibility layer on the PC, which leads me to running AmigaOS just as I would another Linux, or AROS. So the change in perception also leads me to feel better about using WinUAE more often, that I am not abandoning my real amigas... they'd have to pry them from my hands. It also causes me to shake my head at the rediculous argument about OS4 running or not running on x86. I am not going to open that debate other than saying that, in the end, does it really matter? I'm running AmigaOS through a virtual environment just as I would a Linux or Windows because I love the OS... the fact at this point that it's running on a 68x processor means nothing at that level. It would be nice to run OS4 under such an environment... although i don't think that PearPC is fast enough I could be wrong.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts on how I got to this point in justifying to myself using WinUAE more..etc
Just curious how anyone else feels

Thanks for reading if you got this far, and yes, I know, I'll get a life!

Jim