Amiga emulation on 68K or Power PC Mac

[Daishi]

I was wondering when the Mac was capable of being able to emulate an Amiga system. Obviously the Amiga was able to Emulate a 68K based Mac back in the day, and I had assumed that UAE had been ported to the Mac by 1997 (UAE first really working) but I am unable to find any Amiga emulator for a Mac prior to an Intel OS X based Mac in 2006. I'm trying to find out when, on what hardware and how well it ran. Can anyone point me in the right direction or just know these facts. Thanks.

[Matt_H]

It was “possible” but fairly useless. I remember bringing UAE and kick.rom on floppy disks to my school’s Mac LC in 1997. You have to remember the state of UAE back then: poor compatibility, very buggy, and sloooow. They were still calling it “Un*x Amiga Emulator” as I recall. I think Fellow also received a Mac port around that time, too.

The Amiga was by far the better host platform for emulators in those days.

At any rate, if you can dig up the original Unix UAE homepage (probably via the wayback machine at this point) I think it had links/downloads for the Mac 68k version. It may have also appeared on a later Amiga Format or CU cover CD. It might have been on the ancient Amiga Forever v.1 or v.2 CDs, too.

Amazing Computing did an article on Amiga emulation in February 1997 which might have some links to pursue.

[gulliver]

Hi,

Originally it was called the "Unusable Amiga Emulator", and could ran on Power PC Macs.

Minimum hardware requirement were something like a 603ev@160mHz.

I am attaching version 0.8.6 to this post.
(remove the .pdf from the filename)

Have fun

[phx]

Originally Posted by gulliver

Minimum hardware requirement were something like a 603ev@160mHz.

Right. Mac68k hardware were never really capable to emulate an Amiga, but the first faster PowerPC's definitely were.

I am still using E-UAE on Apple PowerBook (G3) and iBook G4 for Amiga development and testing (although running NetBSD and not MacOS).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by phx

Right. Mac68k hardware were never really capable to emulate an Amiga, but the first faster PowerPC's definitely were.

Only because UAE tries to do everything in emulation - no matter what CPU.
So it would emulate a 68k on an other 68k, instead of passing the instructions through like Shapeshifter would do it the other way round ...

Still the chipset-emulation would make it slow... but something like a DraCo-Clone should have been able at full speed on a 68k-Mac.

[Daishi]

Thank you all for the information. So from what I'm getting, MacUAE was compiled for 68K (even though a real 86K Mac really couldn't run it sufficiently) and ran on OS 8-9 (not exactly optimal for PPC either) but there wasn't a PPC specific version.
My next question would be is there a PowerMac emulator I can run on a PC that runs like an actual PowerMac model or will it run as fast as my system will allow. I ask as when I emulate old DOS systems I don't like to use DOSBox as it give an unrealistic platform to emulate, with access to vastly more power that was possible for back then. I have recently started to use PCEM for DOS emulation as I am able to more accurately emulate a system from that era with the hardware spec desired.
I know this seems to be a bit off base for an Amiga site, but I'm trying to get a sense what it was like for those poor ppl who didn't have an Amiga ;-)
Thank you for any information you can give me.

[Daishi]

Originally Posted by phx

Right. Mac68k hardware were never really capable to emulate an Amiga, but the first faster PowerPC's definitely were.

I am still using E-UAE on Apple PowerBook (G3) and iBook G4 for Amiga development and testing (although running NetBSD and not MacOS).

May I ask what you are working on for the Amiga. Sorry if it's widely know here, but even though I have been a long time Amiga user I don't hang out at this site as much as I probably should.

[bwinkel67]

This thread isn't all that old and I found it helpful when trying to locate and run MacUAE for my 68K classic Mac, a Powerbook 180, just for fun. So I got it running and, well, yes, it's slow (though it's pretty stable for being such an early port). I did have to turn on virtual memory since MacUAE required 10MB and I only had 4MB...at least give a point for the Mac having implemented VM in late 80's (or was it early 90's?).

If anyone is interested, I'll include a video link below of me running it. One mistake I made in the video is that I ran Boing in the background while trying other things, so things look really slow, though its response isn't quite as bad when you don't do that. I guess I was eager to see preemptive multitasking on my Mac. I thought the video could be helpful since I found so little info about MacUAE, especially for 68K Macs.

I'm using MacUAE 0.6.0, though their seems to be an earlier version (0.5.0) which was compiled requiring more colors (so I opted for the one that worked with 256-bit color). I plan on playing around over the summer and re-compiling it under ThinkC to see if I can speed things up a bit (it was compiled with a newer compiler: CodeWarrior). I also recently did some Dhrystone runs for it with some interesting results (which I'll publish next week).

[ Show youtube player ]

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by Daishi

I was wondering when the Mac was capable of being able to emulate an Amiga system. Obviously the Amiga was able to Emulate a 68K based Mac .

Iirc there is a UAE port for 68k Amiga but like Gorf says very different approach than something like ShapeShifter.

Originally Posted by Gorf

Only because UAE tries to do everything in emulation - no matter what CPU.
So it would emulate a 68k on an other 68k, instead of passing the instructions through like Shapeshifter would do it the other way round ...

Still the chipset-emulation would make it slow... but something like a DraCo-Clone should have been able at full speed on a 68k-Mac.

[pixie]

Is it even possible to decouple cpu emulation from the chipset?

[Retro1234]

I don't know how much Workbench uses the chipset?
But as far as I know there was never any attempt to load to Kickstart into Memory of an Atari ST or MAC 68k. I wonder if Aros 68k could run on another 68k computer without too much effort. Not really emulation but.....

[pixie]

You have macos emulation running on 68k but uae 68k emulates 68k still and chipset

[jotd]

it would probably be slow even with unemulated 68k just because the chipset handles display, which means everything must be drawn according to amiga bitplanes, probably redrawn fully each time, which means a lot of CPU spent on a task that DMA does "for free".

Not even talking about the blitter, sprites or sound.

A program like lha would fly, but anything graphical would still be slow.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I don't know how much Workbench uses the chipset?
But as far as I know there was never any attempt to load to Kickstart into Memory of an Atari ST or MAC 68k. I wonder if Aros 68k could run on another 68k computer without too much effort. Not really emulation but.....

I hear you, i think both Mac 68k and machines like a x68000 might have advantages from a multitasking operating system, even as a launcher only