stickofjoy posted on May 6 2003 said:
thebluenewt posted on May 6 2003 said:
I'm still hoping for an Amiga emulator I think Jeff has shown us that almost anything can be done if someone (who knows how to program) puts their mind to it! Ahh SWOS on the bus...
Well, I fear Amiga on GP32 may never happen. Jeff is doing a sterling job porting CaSTaway to the GP32, but you can't forget that with CaSTaway and CastCE a lot of the hard work had been done. I'm not saying Jeff's task has been anything less than fantastic though!
With an Amiga emu, unless there is a small, tidy, ARM focused port it's a long way off. Is there such a PocketPC emu in development?
We need some Amiga experts, but my gutt feeling would be an Amiga woudl be much tougher to pull off; the ST had virtuslly no extar rendering hardware. IT had good processing, and was overall a sturdy machine, but most of its greatenss came from its community of developers and users. The Amiga had a lot mroe to it in terms of rendering hardware, so it'd definately push the GP32 a *lot* more. I imagine some of its resolutions could be donme pretty well (ie: Amiga low res) .. comparable to Castaway/GP but a bit slower. But when your'e talking HAM modes etc etc with a lot of fancy stuff going on.. you'd prolly kill things. But it really depends on how optimized the system is.
Some background..
I have my own ST emulator that few know about; "TOSemu"; its a 68k and TOS emualtion.. not an ST per se. IT can't run gEM or VDI or any graphcis routines or timers.. but it does run TOS apps well. I built it to run my BBS in.. so you can telnet to my real ST BBS, from 15 years ago, running in emulation. Cool. But TOSemu woudl be too much work to add graphic and "ST" support into. So I skipped it after basic testing.
I ported STonX, but it was making me angry for a pile of reasons.
Then I ported Castaway proper, as its a simple codebase. It has serious compatability issues, and isn't the most efficient begger out there.
Then I ported CastCE. Its a little less clean codebase (a lot less clean perhaps

, but the author did an immense amoutn of work optimizing it and makign it mroe compatible. Thank him for the sound system, and for an extra 15% speed boost over Castaway proper.
So for Castaway/GP I give them all the creds.. sure I spent 3 weeks of hard time hacking away at it, porting it, building the menu and virtual controls and all that, but I didn't do *that* much for the ST emulation, and I can't afford to.. not enough free time right now. But I wanted an ST emu,so I made one available
So.. an Amiga you say?
UAE is the more popular Amiga emulator I think; I'm not sure how juiced up it is, but las I looked (years ago!), it wasn't the speediest beast around. That may have changed.
What you want is somethign peopel have already optimized the hell outof, so you can do a quick port. Otherwise, if your'e an Amiga lover who knows the hardwarem, you can do some optimization. The GP32 is fast for a *handheld*, but isnt' really fast overall. An emualtion needs *serious* optimization to work well for the GP32.
I got lucky with CastCE.. he'd done a lot of it for me. I was going to work over Castaway (in fac,t I sped it up a good 10 or 15% myself, before I found CastCE

), but he did a wicked job.
I dunno if theres anythign like that for the Amiga though, so someone would have to roll up the sleevbes and get serious, likely.
jeff