Real Amiga or WinUAE?

[christianlucio]

I think the big advantage of WINUAE is that you have several amigas like A500, A1200 and also CDTV or CD32 but of course fot the real feeling you have to choose real Amigas !

[Photon]

I would never choose WinUAE over a real Amiga. If I leave the original Amiga, it will be for a "made new" clone built from modern components. WinUAE is another way to leave the original Amiga, it is excellent and getting better and better. It will never emulate even an A500 100%. But at the same time it's the best Amiga emu and has been a good enough replacement for quite a while now. I'd choose it over a "non-clone new Amiga" any day of the week, but as yet there is no replacement for the real thing.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Photon

I'd choose it over a "non-clone new Amiga" any day of the week, but as yet there is no replacement for the real thing.

We should make a bet if there will ever be a 'clone new Amiga' (as in 100%) You say the amount and the deadline

[PowerPie5000]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

Or a real amiga that smells, is a musty yellow colour, modulator needs bending to get a colour display, slow clunky loading via disk, crap mouse, slow as hell WB which is next to impossible to be of any benefit. A computer the size of a small family hatchback sat on your desk. Having to search through thousands of game disks to find the one you want. Discovering your fave game has a disk read error.....

My Amiga's suffer from none of the above

I don't need to search through thousands of disks when using WHDLoad and also a full PC setup will take up the same, if not more desk space than a real Amiga. My WB is nice and fast due to my accelerator board, but i agree loading from floppy is slow but not always clunky (i also have a nice fast and quiet external FDD ).

Anyway both the Amiga and Winuae are great but i just prefer to use my real expanded A1200 and experience 100% smooth scrolling and accurate audio

[mattbarton.exe]

It depends. If you want an authentic or nostalgic experience, the choice is obvious. Get a few of those read/write errors on your disks and remember it all. Sit around waiting for everything to load. Enjoy not having the option to save at any time. All that is made up for every time you look up and see that Amiga logo!

If you just want to game, though, I don't see any issue with win-uae, especially if you have a good joystick (I use an X-Arcade, myself). But I worry that no matter how close emulation gets, could it ever be 100% accurate? That doesn't matter in most cases, but sometimes a developer has gone to such great lengths to make the perfect experience on a particular set of hardware. Maybe we do lose something vital when we emulate.

[trackah123]

Both i say.

WinUAE is nice for quick testing/playing. but its not always 100% accurate compared to a real Amiga. also smooth scrolling is 1 of those things because of 60hz vsync crap etc.

Real Amiga is just, well the real deal. smooth scrolling and it feels just more nostalgic. disadvantage is that you cannot change 1 slider or option when something goes wrong or doesnt work like WinUAE can

[TCD]

Originally Posted by mattbarton.exe

could it ever be 100% accurate?

Don't think so, but it can get very close (at least for A500 emulation). We shall see if someday noone can find any difference anymore

[gilgamesh]

I voted WinUAE beacause it runs on my notebook computer while my A500 is securely stuffed away.

(Please don't hit me. )

[s2325]

http://www.mmj.pl/~lotharek/atari/www/sd%20floppy.html

[onkelarie]

For me, it's both. winUAE is the way to go when setting up HD's, poking around with different settings, etc.

A real amiga is for me mostly nostalgia.

[StarEye]

Nostalgia is very important, imo. Everyone just blows that off as something you should not take into account, but I never understood why. It's the same when people say "the old Final Fantasy games are no less linear than the original, the freedom you feel is just an illusion". To that, I say, who the fuck cares if it's an illusion or not. What counts is the experience I feel, not why I feel it. Now THAT'S pointless.

If I feel it, I feel it. It's like hearing a song, and if you love it you love it. You can try to reason why you like it, but in the end, it's really unexplainable. That's why two people who hears the same song can have two totally different opinions of that song, even though they enjoy music for the exact same reasons. Some aspects just can't be explained or reasoned at all. Two good melodies, you don't necessarily like them both even if they're similar in style and approach. At least, not equally. And that's not because one is objectively better than the other, but because you just feel one more than the other.

[TCD]

What does Nostalgia have to do with real Amiga or WinUAE? You mean you can get nostalgic when using WinUAE? Guess I would agree on that

[onkelarie]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

What does Nostalgia have to do with real Amiga or WinUAE? You mean you can get nostalgic when using WinUAE? Guess I would agree on that

For me, the nostalgia factor as in: Having the hardware sit on your desktop and feeling/hearing the diskdrive making its distinctive noise when booting up Hybris WinUAE does an excellent job at creating the diskdrive sound (hell, even that drive-singing program works, incredible!), but the desk doesn't resonate together as it does with the real hardware. That's nostalgia for me

Nostalgia is, as mentioned earlier, a personal thing. That doesn't mean the same thing is nostalgic for everyone.

[TCD]

True and the same goes for playing the games because they are still great. Again I'm not sure you need to have 'nostalgic' reasons to prefer the actual hardware, neither does it mean that you can't get nostalgic with WinUAE. In general that is and thus the 'everyone' bit is always a dangerous field to enter

[trackah123]

For me nostalgic is a "youth-kind of feeling" going back in time, the time that Amiga was fun when i was young. A real Amiga and also WinUAE gives me that feeling. thats nostalgic for me

[mld]

for coding and testing stuff it was easier for me to use E-UAE.

For some teardrop moments and digging through my old stuff I fire up my old a500 ;-)

Sold my amiga in 1995.
After that I was using WinUae almost 14 years watching primarily demos and playing games.
In 2010 I bought a used A1200 and expanded to Blizzard 1260, adapters, cf cards, pcmcia cards, joysticks etc etc
----------------------------------------
Well....

Nothing feels like a real Amiga...

[moijk]

Originally Posted by chriskdx

Sold my amiga in 1995.
After that I was using WinUae almost 14 years watching primarily demos and playing games.
In 2010 I bought a used A1200 and expanded to Blizzard 1260, adapters, cf cards, pcmcia cards, joysticks etc etc
----------------------------------------
Well....

Nothing feels like a real Amiga...

As a Mac user, WinUAE would probably require me emulating windows to emulate the Amiga. A road I'm not going to go.

Real amiga with power is both expensive and not as fast, but. it's real. It's like buying that 1986 Porsche 911 that you lusted after your childhood years even though it's slower, doesn't handles as good and is less safe than a performance car in the same price range today. When you are behind the wheel of the new modern sportscar you'll have a blast with the imagination of driving the sports car dream you had, but it never will be the same.

To me the Amiga is the old sports car from the time where a sports car didn't have the same massive power, but it was fast, nippy and fun because it hadn't the bloat of today. So I choose that one. (well, in Amiga terms. A coworker had his childhood dream Porsche and it wasn't much fun once it started to have problems. So I would never own an old sports car. Fortunally, Amigas are more realible)

[haynor666]

Originally Posted by chriskdx

Sold my amiga in 1995.
After that I was using WinUae almost 14 years watching primarily demos and playing games.
In 2010 I bought a used A1200 and expanded to Blizzard 1260, adapters, cf cards, pcmcia cards, joysticks etc etc
----------------------------------------
Well....

Nothing feels like a real Amiga...

I agree in 100%

[Amiga1992]

I'm known for saying repeatedly "nothing beats the real thing", however WinUAE is at such an advanced state of evolution nowadays, I can't see myself not deeming it a NECESSARY tool for ANY -real- Amiga hardware user.

BOTH