Amiga


WarmFluffyUK

The Big Wad Bolf.
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Howdy folks :D,

I was playing Pinball Dreams on my little ole' GP32 just now, and it kinda got me a thinkin'. I used to Love Pinball Dreams/Fantasies on my Amiga, And the GP32 is powerfull enough to play them. I wonder if there's an Amiga Emulator in the pipeline?

I know that Pinball dreams was ported over and isn't emulated, so that's probably why it runs soo smoothly. So I think I'm answering my own question here by saying the Amiga was a rather complex little machine with it's blitter hardware running at 25Mhz etc, and that the GP32 will not be able to handle it all.

But alas, I'm sure you progarammers will proove me wrong (I hope :rolleyes: ).

TTFN,
Clare.
 
There's been a lot of discussion about Amiga emulation in the past and the general consensus is that it wuoldn't be possible to emulate at a decent speed. Afraid you'll have to make do with ST emulation for now...although that's no bad thing, because it gives us *most* of the Amiga's best games.
 
Well mayb its possible as a PCE emu on a 16mhz GBA is also possible......We need a ASM-guru programmer as ASM is razor fast.

So all we need is....... SUPER ASM MAN!!!!!!!!!!, the 24-7 ASM superhero.
 
I'm standing only a few metres from you!!!! *waves*







What's that in the sky? Is it a bit, is it a byte?, no it's.. SUPER ASM MAN!!!

his slogan:
Are you in gaming-need and the MHZ have to be freed? ASM man!
I program asm till my hands bleed!!
 
Basically, ASM is machine code - the direct commands that a CPU can be given. Normally you'd code in C or C++ or something, then the compiler would "translate" that to ASM, and then from ASM into binary. In the compiling process, though, sometimes it makes mistakes - doesn't see where some code is redundant as a result of what is going on - so you tend to end up with a lot of useless code that just slows down the piece of software. If you're programming directly in ASM though, you'd often never write the redundant code in the first place, so the proggy runs faster.

A SUPER ASM Man is someone who routinely codes in Assembly (ASM), and does so well.
 
I agree about the Amiga having the best games though, I still haven't played anything as kewl as the Chaos Engine or Stardust on any other 8 bit system. Except perhaps for Starfox on the SNES
Both the SNES and Amiga were 16-bit (unless it was an A1200 etc which were 32-bit) :rolleyes:

I think an Amiga emu would be possible, especially as we have the cyclone core, but then again I don't know what other processory-type bits it had because I had an ST.
 
Mikey: Unfortunatelly it seems there was no ST version. I have found only three games with the word PINBALL in the title: Pinball Factory, First Person Pinball and Pinball Magic. There may be more pinball names, but surely not any of the ones in question.
 
WarmFluffyUK posted on Sep 17 2004 at 11:50 AM said:
Howdy folks  :D,

I was playing Pinball Dreams on my little ole' GP32 just now, and it kinda got me a thinkin'. I used to Love Pinball Dreams/Fantasies on my Amiga, And the GP32 is powerfull enough to play them. I wonder if there's an Amiga Emulator in the pipeline?

I know that Pinball dreams was ported over and isn't emulated, so that's probably why it runs soo smoothly. So I think I'm answering my own question here by saying the Amiga was a rather complex little machine with it's blitter hardware running at 25Mhz etc, and that the GP32 will not be able to handle it all.

But alas, I'm sure you progarammers will proove me wrong (I hope  :rolleyes: ).

TTFN,
Clare.


Well sorry to say forget about Amiga, it will never happen on GP32. Yes there were too many custom co-processors etc for the GP32 to emulate. The GP32 has trouble with Genesis and that has less chips and even all of those aren't all emulated (no Z80). Even the ST which was simpler is not 100% emulated although it is decent. So you will have to use CaSTaway to get an Amiga like experience. Most Amiga games were just un-enhanced ports of ST stuff anyway(used to piss me off in the day that the extra Amiga features weren't used like they should). The ST is basically like an Amiga with a few less colors and kind of dodgy sound, but it works pretty well on the GP32. There were some good games for the ST.
 
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Actually, it's more like the ST were ports of a lot of the amiga games. The ST doesn't even compare to the Amiga.

The main reason the ST was soo pupular was the music industry, the ST had built in MIDI ports, and the timing on those ports had very low latency. Plus Cubase, it was the sequencer for all studios!

Anyway, I don't want to start up that old Amiga and ST bashing that went on years ago LOL...

Clare.
 
This is a quote from Skeezix re porting pocket UAE for the GP32.

"UAE woudlnt' really be great in terms of raw speed -- but I woudl imagine some games would be playable with some skip and with audio off. ie: Even on high poweed devices the audio tends to be first to get dropped, or face skippage I asked Pocket UAE fellow about it and he suggests its not great on 200MHz but does work well for some things, while hes doing most of his personal testing against 400MHz. But dropping in Cyclone could really kick it up a notch, but I still wouldnt' expect it to be as usable as CaSTaway. But the fact some things should be playable at all is pretty darned cool And with the way things are going in GP32 land, I wouldnt' doubt seeing someone with a fluke 230MHz device one of these days

jeff "

The Whole thread is here
 
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WarmFluffyUK posted on Sep 17 2004 at 06:07 PM said:
Actually, it's more like the ST were ports of a lot of the amiga games. The ST doesn't even compare to the Amiga.

The main reason the ST was soo pupular was the music industry, the ST had built in MIDI ports, and the timing on those ports had very low latency. Plus Cubase, it was the sequencer for all studios!

Anyway, I don't want to start up that old Amiga and ST bashing that went on years ago LOL...

Clare.

Games , even today, are usually made on the weaker systems and then ported up. Like now it is common to have Xbox games that are straight ports of PS2 games.

The reason is simple if you make a game on a weaker system the stronger one can run the port easily with minimal changes to the art and engine. This means less work and more profit for the game maker and also means the better system gets something that is not as good as it could be.

If you were to go the other way (stronger to weaker) then there would be alot of work to cut things down to run well on the weak system.

As to Amiga and ST, ports were almost always from the ST to the Amiga. This is because it was easier mostly for artists to draw their graphics in 16 colors out of 512 for the ST and then port it straight over to the Amiga with no extra work involved. If they did it the other way and did the art for the Amiga using 32 colors out of 4096 when the game was ported to the ST they would need to cut out HALF of the colors, re-map the palette to 512, and even redraw some things which is MUCH more work. The thing that actually WAS upgraded frequently on the Amiga was the audio because the Amiga had a completely different sound chip than the ST so a straight port was not possible anyway.
 
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Dozer posted on Sep 17 2004 at 06:06 PM said:
I thought Skeezix was messing about testing porting that new amiga emu for the pocket pc (or was it palm?). Am I getting confused? :huh:

I think it was Palm, but remember there are 400 Mhz Palms out there. So it would make sense to do it for Palm. The only bad thing about Palm is the poor controls.
 
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