Amiga Format UAE article (March 1998)

[Mequa]

Interesting to see how much Amiga emulation has improved since then:

http://www.simon.mooli.org.uk/AF/16.html

Full A1200 emulation is barely conceivable...

Looks like it didn't take Toni that long to solve that problem

It would be interesting to list which limitations of the early UAE have been surmounted, and which remain. It's come a long way.

[Toni Wilen]

Possibly related..

Few days ago I was randomly looking for old newgroup posts about possibility of Amiga emulation in early 1990s..

Found some nice quotes like:

"To emulate an Amiga would require extra hardware, because much of the Amiga's internal hardware operates in parallel, and no matter how fast of a processor you get, it will be almost impossible to emulate a parallel architecture."

"No. This 'pre-emptive multitasting' thing is _not_ the reason an Amiga emulator is impossible. It's because of the graphic chip set. It is proprietary to CBM, and cannot be emulated in real time."

"I can tell you: there was/is and will never be an amiga emulator for your PC. "

(of course some sane people said it is possible in future but not with current hardware)

EDIT: to keep this more on topic: perhaps illogically the worst part in exact modes is the CPU, not chipset! Chipset timings are practically completely known today. 68000 is more or less correct but 68020 is much more complex CPU to emulate 100% exactly.

[Mad-Matt]

The writter couldnt have predicted that 20 years later when everyone had forgotten what an amiga was that the hardware would be powerful enough to to finaly emulate the Amiga near enough perfectly in both compatability and performance.

[Mequa]

Just 12.5 years after that article was written, and we have WinUAE's JIT running on a 4GHz i7 delivering speeds comparable to a... Pentium III?
At least, far in excess of any 68060 ever built.

[Mequa]

Around 1998 I corresponded with the author of the FAST emulator for DOS. Originally planned as an Amiga emulator, the project went on to incorporate Atari ST support and eventually dropped the Amiga part after the rise of UAE.

From what I remember of FAST 0.2's Amiga emulation, it was limited to starting Kickstart 1.3 and repeatedly rebooting before the screen even cleared

I asked if full CD32 emulation could be possible on the PC. If I remember correctly, he said "maybe someday"

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Mequa

...it was limited to starting Kickstart 1.3 and repeatedly rebooting before the screen even cleared

Wow! He was really close! My Amiga 1000 was doing exactly that when I was accidently connecting (Well, crushing against is a more accurate description) the floppy LED wires to the metal floppy cage.



desiv

[ck1200]

Very interesting article thanks for posting!!

[Mequa]

The AMR scans of AF108 are missing this article (starting on page 21).
It would be interesting to see a scanned version if anyone has this issue, as it was edited slightly for publication.

http://amr.abime.net/issue_264_pages

Simon Goodwin's site http://www.simon.mooli.org.uk/AF/index.html has some scanned AF content (redistributable only with written permission), although not this article.

[ElectroBlaster]

It was that very magazine story that finally made me jump from an amiga to a pc. I felt that a point was reached where I could use the pc for internet and other tasks but still keep my miggy's soul captured even if it ment living inside something evil.

Fast forward to today and I still have my real amigas but I love how quickly I can get winuae up and running to test something out. Things have really moved on from the old days. Thinking about it I have the original 1.77mb hd floppies I used to grab an early beta of winuae and a real amiga 3.0 rom image.

[Djay]

licensed to Cloanto by Gateway 2000

[laffer]

Thanks for the link, interesting read!