Is there Amiga Emulator for Iphone 3GS?

[Photon]

As mentioned, controls will forever be a problem on touchscreen devices that have no buttons. If there was an emulator you'd probably never use it because you'd curse at the controls all the time...

[seuden]

Strategy games work pretty well tho.

[Vairn]

It really depends on your mindset for the joystick controls.
If you have an ipad, and an iphone/ipod you will be able to use the phone as a controller.
which is a little easier. anything that involves the mouse is the easiest, followed by Joystick, then keyboard.

[chiark]

If you're after a beta tester Vairn... I'll PM you

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Vairn

It really depends on your mindset for the joystick controls.
If you have an ipad, and an iphone/ipod you will be able to use the phone as a controller.
which is a little easier. anything that involves the mouse is the easiest, followed by Joystick, then keyboard.

Sense, you Make none. ,



Touchscreen devices: It's a hard time for the game designer to limit his ideas to the non-controls present on these devices. What you get is a subset of games "that work with touch" + "games that don't work with touch where we've adapted the game to where it requires not much input from the user".

Quite apart from that, this thread is about emulation, Vairn. What's left is joystick-controlled action games where you could possibly touch a graphical d-pad and expect any accuracy, or point-and-click games that might or might not select the point you clicked on with your 40x40 Amiga-pixel fingers, covering a good part of the screen.

Anyway

I can see a reason for emulation on control-less devices if the goal is running demos, of course

[Vairn]

I do that alot, the make sense. part

As with controls, I have a free idea's for the joystick, you shall be able to choose from.
"D-pad"
"Accelerometer"
"Swipe"

There will be an on screen keyboard, and a customizable key layout.

The mouse will have a relative, like a touchpad, and a 1:1 mapping.

[T_hairy_bootson]

This!

http://icontrolpad.coM

ignore the pic at the top of the page and scroll down.

[killergorilla]

Nice and compact too!

[Welshieinnz]

For those of you with an iPhone (not me), this looks pretty promising.

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2010/12/i...app-store.html

[Vairn]

Less emu, more game wrapper, like golden axe, and sonic etc.
Emulation yes, but only one or so game is the model they're looking at. Like the C64 emu.
I doubt that sony will let sotb, or any of those games be released.
Cool, but limited.

On other news.
http://www.tenonedesign.com/fling.php
looks cool, but
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/01/pu...-on-your-ipad/
looks better, hehe

[seuden]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

This!

http://icontrolpad.coM

ignore the pic at the top of the page and scroll down.

I wonder why they've made that atrocity instead of this one.

[Vairn]

No room for the 2 analogue sticks I guess.

[seuden]

What iPhone games use 3 direction pads/sticks? I've never seen a game or app that does.

[Vairn]

shrugs, but that was the only difference between the two of them.

[mrbob2]

Hey Vairn, i have a jailbroken 4.1 iphone4 and if you need a beta tester id love to try out your work in progress and give you feedback. The C64 emu doesnt work on 4.1 only the spectrum emu is now on the app store. The whole point of an emulator for me is to be able to load my own roms onto the device, rather than play a handful of selected roms. Id love to be able to play mouse games on the iphone, such as worms directors cut, ufo enemy unknown and even dpaint 3! Apple are really fussy when it comes to emulators as like dosbox, anything than accesses the iphone is a way apple dont authorise they wont allow on thier app store so i guess cydia is the way forward. Im a member of a big iphone forum and once this app comes out (fingers crossed) il be sure to tell everyone i can about it, wether they are amiga fans or not, it would be something pretty special and it could become the future of amiga emulation. Im surprised toni willen and other amiga coders havnt already ported WINUAE etc to the iphone.

As for controls, yeah having a touch screen makes it harder but like PSX emu, you can have 50/50 screen and controls or big buttons overlayed on the screen. The best thing about amiga games is you just need up down left right and 1 button for fire :-)

[Vairn]

I have looked at porting winuae, it should be fine on a ipad, or iphone 4.
But the cpu core is too slow for the 3gs.
I have currently got cpuemu working and fame cpu core.
Cpuemu is slow on the 3gs, but it is nice on the ipad etc.

[T_hairy_bootson]

Originally Posted by seuden

What iPhone games use 3 direction pads/sticks? I've never seen a game or app that does.

Playstation emulator.

Originally Posted by Vairn

I have looked at porting winuae, it should be fine on a ipad, or iphone 4.
But the cpu core is too slow for the 3gs.
I have currently got cpuemu working and fame cpu core.
Cpuemu is slow on the 3gs, but it is nice on the ipad etc.

The 3GS is running the same ARMv7 architecture as the iPhone 4 (800MHz) and iPad (1GHz), albeit at a slower, 600MHz. It is more than adequate to run Amiga emulation, as my [ Show youtube player ] shows (that's my 3GS). I have written my own hybrid C/ARM optimized 68000 core, which gave me the necessary boost for the 3GS. It runs up to 2x faster than the straight FAME/C core, and I know I could tweak it more.

Here is TouchArcade's more recent hand's on with my work.

I've more recently got TV out working (and it's awesome) and fixed a few long standing bugs in my 68K core. I think I still have a few to work out, but doesn't effect most games.

One of the more recent bugs I resolved was pretty interesting. Shadow of the Beast used a crazy technique whereby a branch instruction was set to an odd address, thus raising an address exception. In turn this directed to a handler to display the big "IN" graphic, which caused my core to hang.

Cheers,

Stu

Originally Posted by Vairn

Pretty Cool, I wondered what happened to that one.
It will be interesting how apple handles it, since he also needs to license the roms.
Optimizing the CPU for arm, is trivial performance boostage IMO. The slower parts I found were the updating the gfx, and the sound emulation. But since he is aiming for the App store, instead of Cydia. I guess he can't really write directly to the device's pixelbuffer. Basically it is 3ms, compared to like 12-15ms.

PS. You don't need a Jailbroken Iphone for the direct Pixel access, just need to use a "private" API from apple.

We have licensed the Amiga ROMs and likewise the games that we release. I'll also release all the code (including my optimized C/ARM core) once it hits the App store.

Yes, it sucks not being able to use CoreSurface, but I've spent hours determining the fast path for Core Graphics and found that 16-bit BGR1 (5551) was the absolute best for the older ARM1176 / MBX. Seems to be just a favourable for the ARMv7/SGX hardware. I'm moving to OpenGL for iAmiga as I've written some GLSL shaders to produce effects that improve the look for the higher-res displays, inspired by Mame OSX.

These images are taken from a simulated Retina display

No Effect


50% Scanlines


Aperture 1x2 (RB)

[Vairn]

I said, that the Winuae CPU core is too slow on a 3gs (but it does add 020+)
The fame-c one is fine for the 3gs.

Yeah, BRG1, is the best I found for Apple approved API, when it is needed, (aka my day job), since that has to go via the appstore (even though it is just for the company to access internally)

Are you using OpenAL for sound, It works extremely well.

how fast is openGL, did you loose performance, or is it about the same?
Using shaders for the scanlines etc is a good idea.