WinUAE: Emulation Amithlon

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

Try copying an Amithlon system to a HardFile and then try booting it from WinUAE.
The Amithlon system starts quietly on WinUAE as a normal OS Amiga Standard Amithlon applications and its devices are ignored.

Well... yes?

Amithlon is not strictly an Amiga. It has no Amiga custom chipset for starters, and all the software that you run must be system legal. The reason is that although it emulates a reasonably accurate JIT 68k emulation, all hardware access goes through special drivers written to interface with the PC hardware.

Boot your HDF in WinUAE and none of those devices will exist.

Amithlon is an emulator, nothing more than that. It's not as capable as WinUAE and the only reason it's faster is because it plugs into your PC hardware for things like the display and sound - it hands off those tasks rather than emulates them as WinUAE does.

So emulating an x86 inside WinUAE for the purposes of running Amithlon would be:

1. Slow as hell
2. Pointless - you could actually run less software than you can in WinUAE
3. The very definition of insanity.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Dunny we did not understand each other, have you ever tried to install or upgrade Amithlon? doing this on Amithlon besides being a penance brings a lot of lost time. If you then add the possible errors to be corrected by startups or otherwise the thing becomes problematic.

Doing the same things with WinUAE is child's play, I updated Amitlon with AfA-OS in a few minutes, on Amithlon it would have taken hours and a dozen coffees.

VirtualBox-WinUAE HardFile Creation and Sharing

Amithlon Afa-OS Update (notice the speed and software compatibility)

[Dunny]

That's more to do with Amithlon's emulation being imperfect than anything else - and Amithlon having a very, very narrow window of hardware that can be used. I have several PCs here of varying ages and none of them can run Amithlon which is a shame.

Mind you, I run Amilator on my old Core i5 laptop now and that gives amithlon-like performance with the added bonus of being able to run any Amiga software you care to mention - though it does have its drawbacks regarding stuff like floppy handling.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Yes I really like Amlator but they are two things a bit different, Amilator is "more" emulator uses FS-UAE and uses emulated hardware, see Video Card, Sound Card etc..
Amithlon instead uses drivers native hardware Audio, Video Card, Network, USB, more like OS4.1 emulation !

Amithlon - VirtualBox Setting

For those of you who don't know Amilator, this is my Amilator AfA-OS.

[ Show youtube player ]

[ Show youtube player ]

[nobody]

Amithlon is faster on OS but doesn't run all software (slow UAE emulation), while Amilator is a bit slower on OS but runs everything better. If I had to choose one I would go for Amilator. Amithlon is too old.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

On this I agree, Amithlon is very old and could certainly give much more if someone updated him. For the software compatibility at the moment I have not found anything that does not work on Amithlon.

For speed no doubt that Amithlon is faster, analyze my two attached videos and watch the opening of AmigaAMP, on Amithlon the opening is immediate (faster than on Windows), while on Amilator (also WinUAE) you notice for a few seconds the loading bar.

[malko]

Originally Posted by Dunny

That's more to do with Amithlon's emulation being imperfect than anything else [...]

It should not be forgotten that, back in the day, this product was "nipped in the bud" by the people in charge at that time (on the same IP grounds as the current legal battles). So it was quickly removed from the market and there was never official updates, even if the users were strongly requesting it.
An Amithlon V2 was also considered at one point, but... you know, some people are more interested to IP than pushing the things forward ... (do not interpret my words, I did not say, nor imply that IP should not be protected).

Bad decisions is part of the DNA of the Amiga's legacy...

Originally Posted by Dunny

[...] Amithlon having a very, very narrow window of hardware that can be used. [...]

Again, because there was no official updates.
We should be grateful to the people who had written some non-official drivers since then .

Originally Posted by Dunny

[...] I have several PCs here of varying ages and none of them can run Amithlon which is a shame. [...]

+1. Until I tried PCem

Some more (old) infos :
- faq from Bernie
- amithlonfaq
- how Total Amiga is produced

[Dunny]

Yeah, I'm well aware of the history of Amithlon and Umilator

And running Amithlon via any form of emulation is kind of defeating the object!

[Minuous]

What might be useful would be the ability to run Amithlon programs (eg. http://aminet.net/search?arch[]=i386-amithlon) on WinUAE; both can run x86 code but presumably there is some difference between the two from the guest software's point of view meaning that they are currently not compatible.

[Seiya]

virtualize Amithlon could be more important to improve devoloping new kernel, new compatibility in new hardware. Virtualbox don't emulate cpu, so if you want run Amithlon on your hardware, Virtualbox is the only way to otpmize amithlon linux kernel