Amiga emulator devs, here's a prophecy you'll enjoy...

[dreamkatcha]

Is there an Amiga emulator for the PC?

No, and there never will be - the Amiga contains too many custom chips. An emulator would be at least as expensive as an Amiga.

Lloyd 'Pseudonym' Mangram, Commodore Force, January 1993

Ha! Stupid yesterpeople. Can't even predict the future!

[roondar]

They weren't wrong though - the emulators were initially only possible on a PC at least as expensive as an Amiga

[TCD]

Never say never That reminds me to check on original XBox emulation again...

[Anubis]

Interesting, have not checked it in a while...

https://xemu.app/#compatibility

As for Amiga emulator for PC... never mind...

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by roondar

They weren't wrong though - the emulators were initially only possible on a PC at least as expensive as an Amiga

That makes them half not wrong, because the "and there never will be" part is about as false als false can be.

What would be really funny and not entirely impossible is that the first version of the first Amiga emulator came to be because someone read that very statement and decided to correct someone being wrong on the inte... in a magazine.

[jotd]

first, UAE meant "unusable amiga emulator".

[malko]

Originally Posted by jotd

first, UAE meant "unusable amiga emulator".

And now, with all its available working functionalities, it means "Ultramoderne Amiga Emulator"

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Anubis

Interesting, have not checked it in a while...

https://xemu.app/#compatibility

Had a look myself yesterday and it's much better than a few years ago, but it's still a long way to go

Originally Posted by jotd

first, UAE meant "unusable amiga emulator".

I imagine that's how most emulators start

[PortuguesePilot]

The first PC I owned that ran an Amiga 500 emulator in a satisfactory way was a Pentium III @ 500MHz mounted on an ASUS P2B motherboard with 512MB RAM, an ATi Rage Fury 128 graphic card, a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, a Quantum Fireball 1.3GB IDE hard disk, an ASUS 50x CD-ROM drive and ran Windows 98 SE. The display was a 17" CTX VL700 and it boosted the sound through a Cambridge SoundWorks FPS1000 4.1 Surround speaker set. WinUAE was version 8.8r8 and it only emulated OCS (no AGA yet). This in 1999.

Yep... To properly emulate the Amiga you needed a very powerful system worth around 1000€ at the time (about 2000€ in today's money) and work of very talented people who created a very competent emulator of a very complicated and unique computer.

Consoles like the Mega Drive or the SNES ran well on my 486DX4 in 1996 or thereabouts. Even arcade hardware like the CPS1 or the Neo-Geo ran well on the 486DX4. The Amiga didn't. The Sony PSP, for instance, is capable of runing almost every 16bit system flawlessly while it struggles to run Amiga games with low fps and many hiccups. And the culprit is not the quality of the emulator but the complexity of the "emulated features", particularly the OCS chipset, which is very demanding on hardware.

So yeah... they failed their prediction but I can seriously understand why they said what they said at that time.

[pandy71]

AFAIK there is no possible to fully emulate Amiga on PC even today without additional hardware so still claim from 1993 is valid - personally i estimated PC CPU clock required to do proper Amiga emulation to be over 1GHz and for many of us passing 1GHz border for CPU clock was not so realistic - technology also stopped at some point and some breakthrough in silicone technology made Amiga emulation possible... Not so obvious in 1993.
In those times better Amiga emulation was possible with Fellow - at those times (pre 1GHz+ CPU clock) it was able to deliver some extra gain where UEA failed.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by pandy71

AFAIK there is no possible to fully emulate Amiga on PC even today without additional hardware so still claim from 1993 is valid - personally i estimated PC CPU clock required to do proper Amiga emulation to be over 1GHz and for many of us passing 1GHz border for CPU clock was not so realistic

Are you talking about today or some time in the past? The 1 Ghz clock speed was passed in 1999. What part of 'Amiga' isn't emulated fully today?

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by TCD

Are you talking about today or some time in the past? The 1 Ghz clock speed was passed in 1999. What part of 'Amiga' isn't emulated fully today?

I'd also be interested to know what bits can't be done without additional hardware - thanks

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by TCD

Are you talking about today or some time in the past? The 1 Ghz clock speed was passed in 1999. What part of 'Amiga' isn't emulated fully today?

Apologies, i assumed it was quite clear that it was in reference to pre 1GHz CPU clock, today even 5GHz is not so surprising but in the first half of 90's it looks so unrealistic (mostly due of heat issues but not only, FSB limitation, fundamental change in mother board architecture - moving from asynchronous to synchronous etc. even power supply deliver changed - P3 Coppermine was first Intel CPU that pass 1GHz border - this was at the beginning of 2000).

From my perspective Paula seem to be most difficult to be properly emulated on modern PC - first variable sampling used for audio where sampling rates may achieve over 1 MSps (not compatible with synchronous, fixed sample rate common in PC), secondly UART (same as before - variable, non PC standard speeds), finally quite obvious thing like floppy. There is no possible to use uPD765 and its derivatives to read and write native for Amiga system floppies - you need extra HW to do such things like read and write floppy - please notice that nowadays floppy controller is removed from PC but this happened after 2000 not before. Side to this of course other functionality possible in real HW and not possible in PC.
Not sure if UAE (WinUAE) is capable to emulate all possible ways to produce audio - even PWM modulated.
Yes, i agree that most of the Amiga emulation users is unaware of this limitations and such functionality is rarelly used even in original Amiga HW.

Not sure also if any existing Amiga emulator is capable to emulate variable system clock - thing relatively easy to perform on real Amiga.

(not sure if cycle exact mode in WinUAE work internally with 28/14/7/3.5/1.7MHz).

[grond]

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

Is there an Amiga emulator for the PC?

No, and there never will be - the Amiga contains too many custom chips. An emulator would be at least as expensive as an Amiga.

Lloyd 'Pseudonym' Mangram, Commodore Force, January 1993

That was when Commodore was still around and it was assumed that new more powerful Amigas would come out in parallel to the PC becoming more powerful. Basically it may have been meant similar to how PCTask would never be as fast as a contemporary real PC (with the Vampire I believe we now get something like 286ish to slow 386ish performance in PCTask in at least some programs but this is slightly too late, the PC has moved on a little since the Amiga's heyday). Amiga development mostly came to a halt so the emulated Amiga could overtake the real Amigas but that wasn't known yet in 1993 (even though it could have been expected by those reading the writing on the walls).

[rothers]

Originally Posted by rare_j

I'd also be interested to know what bits can't be done without additional hardware - thanks

It would have been the disk drive at the time.