WinUAE Development. Better than the real thing...yet?

[antiriad76]

As someone who has followed the development of the Amiga emulation and contributed on the Lazarus project back in the Mid 90s I have come to admit that WinUAE has reached a point where it has become my main preference of the Retro Amiga computing. These days I find myself less and less willing to fire up my real Amigas. The last few years have been excellent thanks to Tony's work with advances in PPC emulation and PC Bridgeboards.

I find WinUAE to work almost perfectly in all aspects of the emulation except the Audio portion where even today I am still getting some audio stuttering.

Without remembering all the inner workings of WinUAE how would you rate your overall experience with the emulation in regards with the following aspects?

- 020/030 Emulation
- 040/060 Emulation
- PPC Emulation
- Sound Emulation
- RTG Emulation
- MMU/FPU Emulation

Does anyone know how "Complete" the 68060 Emulation is?

Thanks

Mike

[Toni Wilen]

IMHO this is wrong question, like there is only one choice. There is always good reasons for both real hardware and emulation, it is never black and white and they are not mutually exclusive or sort of competitors.

"Complete" is also not that simple. I'd use "feature complete" to mean high level things (like instructions) work as documented without including timing, memory access order etc. Only 100% fully complete is 68000 emulation.

MMU is feature complete (except 68851 but no one cares or uses 68851-only features), FPU is feature complete and accurate (softfloat mode) in 3.4.1. All CPUs are feature complete.

PPC emulation compatibility equals QEMU. If there are problems, they may be fixed in later QEMU versions but I am not interested in any PPC-only optimizations (for example filesystem/RTG could work much faster than currently) without, lets say, incentives..

Paula sound (or did you mean sound cards?) is accurate and complete, any glitches are due to other problems (usually lack of CPU time because something else wasted it too much) that don't have anything to do with sound emulation.

[White]

Hi Toni thank you once again for the work you do, thanks to winuae today I use amiga as once, thank you very much indeed.
At the time personally use winuae with 3.9 is all the various add-ons released Amikit AfaOS and so on. etc.
My thanks also goes to them for all the improvements that I make.

I now also use OS4.1 update1
From my point of view the emulation is perfect, certainly I can not continuously report small defects that you said were there.
Ever since I wrote the last time I configured the ppc emulation best,
Even not having a recent PC, I only have an A8 3510mx quad core notebook from my point of view I'm satisfied.
Of course there is something that keeps me crazy :-)
Emotion Player turns extremely fast and fluid audio is perfect only sometimes does it feel a little delay in sound synchronization, but that was something you already explained to me.
It would be nice to understand for me how I could remove this little imperfection, but as you said, it depended on video and audio sync.
I hope that in the near future you will want and time to perfect this ppc emulation.

And thank you again for your work that I really appreciate.

IMO the only reason I'd use bare-metal hardware at this point over UAE is to use a cybervisionppc/bvisionppc/radeon/voodoo for warp3d in both OS3 and OS4. Aside from that, I have no real need for an actual Amiga.

[AC/DC HACKER!]

I use my real Amiga because CSPPC's emulation (more pointed to 060's MMU I'm sure) isn't as accurate yet as my Amiga 4000 Desktop's CSPPC. Even if I switch off "Fastest possible" "Black Gold" even with the updates from WHDLoad, still plays faster through WinUAE and is always accurate with my real Amiga. Most games are like this. I'm okay with switching that off and having "Accurate A500/1200..." enabled to get the almost correct speeds when playing.

As Toni has commented, and I very much agree, I wouldn't go so far as calling them 100% accurate and though I've donated a couple times and more to come, it's effort and passion that drives this project. I can see where the different parts will become better and it'll soon be "An Amiga Like" as much as possible. But a replacement for the hardware? Not yet, and understandably so. The Amiga, hardware and software is complex.

There have been times I've hoped the 68060(MMU) emulation were better but I've watched it being improved. That's why I donate once in a while, as able. I don't offer many bug reports because that requires more effort than I've been able to do (Family and other stuff.."in the way", haha.)

But it's a very good emulator...at current state, the betas are pretty awesome. I sometimes wonder what "bored" actually means when Toni types it...because I wouldn't consider it boring, but I think that means would like more donations than he's or the Team is getting.

I adore the "Save State" for floppy games, but I play other games and use utilities with WinUAE from my emulated CSPPC and Picasso 4. So, all in all, it's in very, very good shape and improving.

The Amiga wasn't done, I can see where plans were to make the Motherboard even better and had the development continued it would have become even more awesome. That's how I view WinUAE. Lots and lots of High 5's to Toni, and only he and the developers know how "Complete" it is under the hood (code).

Personally, if I left all the switches on to keep CSPPC's zer060 from being enabled/disabled for "normal" speed, it's slower than my Amiga 4000. At least a little. I'd like to see that improve but those are a lot of details under the hood being taken care of. Until then, "Fast as possible" is easily switched. Sometimes, the 2nd "Cycle Exact DMA Memmory Acess" has to be enabled.

I'm not a speed junky, and I'm not into Instant Gratification, I remember doing a lot of things from floppies so my friends call me incredibly patient, but that's now how I view things. Anyway, I DO like the speed of WinUAE though Blizzard PPC's PPC and zer060 has some bugs, the speed is sweet and I've used WinUAE to setup and copy stuff to my real Amigas.

My .02 cents. I appreciate both 68K and PPC. Some times I wish Amiga OS was ported to AMD and Intel, I'm not an Intel fan, per-se, but it would make it more open to development and more people would get to know it. As Toni has commented and this is not exact, I think the current owners are more into politics than the passion of why the Amiga was made in the first place

[Pyromania]

WinUAE is one of the finest examples of how to do a proper Virtual Machine.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by AC/DC HACKER!

I use my real Amiga because CSPPC's emulation (more pointed to 060's MMU I'm sure) isn't as accurate yet as my Amiga 4000 Desktop's CSPPC. Even if I switch off "Fastest possible" "Black Gold" even with the updates from WHDLoad, still plays faster through WinUAE and is always accurate with my real Amiga. Most games are like this. I'm okay with switching that off and having "Accurate A500/1200..." enabled to get the almost correct speeds when playing.

This has been mentioned many times.

From CPU point of view (especially if 68060) Amiga chipset/chip ram access speed is horribly slow so you really need "memory cycle exact" to slow down the CPU enough to match real Amigas. Speed difference can be easily over 10x vs onboard accelerator fast RAM.

Same would happen with any hardware reimplementations that don't simulate slow chip ram/registers.

Technically this is also whdload slave bug.