A handheld for emulating Amiga?


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pachura

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Hi,

For emulating Amiga on a handheld, the Pandora is an obvious choice.

But are there any other, cheaper devices, equally capable of emulating A500/A1200?

Gemei A330, Dingoo A-320, GCW-ZERO would not work for me, as they have 320x240 screens only (Amiga had 320x256). Also, I believe that at least 1 GHz CPU is needed to properly emulate Amiga (funny, knowing it originally ran at 7 MHz ;)  )

Therefore, the only other alternative seems to be Android devices - JXD S7800B, iBen-L1, Archos Gamepad 2, Nvidia's Shield. Any idea how well would they emulate Amiga? Is UAE4Droid any good? ...comparable to the Pandora port of UAE4All?

Thanks!
 
Without a keyboard and built in controls none are worth bothering with.

Pandora may not be the cheapest but you get what you pay for.
 
I tried UAE4all on my shield.

It runs better than the Pandora, but i couldn't assign my controls correctly. I had to use the mapper to assign controls on the virtual controls, so they appear on the screen and I don't like it

I didn't try uae4droid enough but it seems to work fine.

They should work nice on the S7800 too.

Don't count on the Gemei/Dingoo for the A1200. For now, there's no official amiga emulator on the Zer0.
 
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For sake of fairness I have tried UAE4Droid on my Galaxy S3 and it was a real pain to get working.

I used an OTG lead & hub to plug in a USB keyboard, mouse and PS2 controller to get things set up but it really wasn't worth the effort.

The main difference was the screen, pinball games had less blurring due to the OLED screen on the Galaxy but for the effort required to configure controls it really wasn't worth it.
 
I guess some netbook would work but it's not really handeld anymore... but with full keyboard and fiting a pocket you won't have many other choice than a pandora
 
ekianjo said:
Yup, you need a proper keyboard to emulate the Amiga, and you need a Pandora for that, there's not much choice out there in handhelds equipped with keyboards. 
Click to expand...
Well, while I agree that physical buttons + an analog nub are a must (to act as a joystick + mouse), I think that one could get away with no keyboard.

I don't know if I recall correctly, but weren't you able to control most Amiga games using the joystick only?
 
pachura said:
I don't know if I recall correctly, but weren't you able to control most Amiga games using the joystick only?
Click to expand...
I had an Amiga for years (and still have it somewhere) and yeah you could play a lot of games with a joystick on, but even games like Turrican needed extensive keyboard controls to access all options. And that's just arcade games. When you go into more serious games, keyboard was mandatory. 
 
Most games needed a mouse click or keyboards press to get going and in game you could use the joystick for actual play.

But if you wanted to save your game or bring up the options you'd need the keyboard again.
 
PokeParadox said:
Most games needed a mouse click or keyboards press to get going and in game you could use the joystick for actual play.

But if you wanted to save your game or bring up the options you'd need the keyboard again.
Click to expand...
But then you can use virtual keyboard, I guess. And if you e.g. need the space key to throw grenades, you can map it to one of shoulder buttons...

Of course, physical keyboard is very nice, especially if you want to run Workbench or keyboard-heavy games (in old Sierra adventures, e.g. Larry 3, you had to type the commands). But I'm just wondering whether Shield/JXD would be better than Pandora for Amiga games due to their nicer screens and more horsepower... and price.
 
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Well the answer should be obvious - if you are prepared to mess around with remapping keys/virtual keyboards, etc - The Shield/JXD etc will probably be good enough.

If you just want to play the game and have the keys ready and waiting - The Pandora already provides this.

The other alternative would be a netbook and a USB/Bluetooth controller but much less portable than a Pandora.
 
pachura said:
PokeParadox said:
Most games needed a mouse click or keyboards press to get going and in game you could use the joystick for actual play.


But if you wanted to save your game or bring up the options you'd need the keyboard again.
Click to expand...
 
But then you can use virtual keyboard, I guess. And if you e.g. need the space key to throw grenades, you can map it to one of shoulder buttons...


Of course, physical keyboard is very nice, especially if you want to run Workbench or keyboard-heavy games (in old Sierra adventures, e.g. Larry 3, you had to type the commands). But I'm just wondering whether Shield/JXD would be better than Pandora for Amiga games due to their nicer screens and more horsepower... and price.
Click to expand...
you shouldnt buy a pandora if its just for amiga emulation. you buy a pandora because you want to be able to do everything and no less on it.
 
ekianjo said:
you shouldnt buy a pandora if its just for amiga emulation. you buy a pandora because you want to be able to do everything and no less on it.
Click to expand...

The question is: what handheld should I buy if it's mainly for Amiga emulation?

It was interesting what BAFelton wrote that on his Shield he was not able to use physical buttons in UAE4all. This of course would ruin the whole idea.
 
No point arguing.  No real keyboard = No real Amiga Experience.  Period.  Buy the Pandora and you will have close to real Amiga experience.  Buy any other device and you will have half-ass Amiga experience.  Period. Period.  At the end, it's your money though so spend it whatever way you'd like :)
 
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ekianjo said:
you shouldnt buy a pandora if its just for amiga emulation
Click to expand...
If that's the primary goal, and the price for that sole job doesn't seem excessive, then why not? That price would be too high for me personally if I was just looking to emulate one computer, but not necessarily for others. All the other features then come as a "bonus".

Shenmue said:
No real keyboard = No real Amiga Experience
Click to expand...
The only way to get a real Amiga experience is to buy an actual Amiga!

I can't help with the purchasing decision. I found trying to play Amiga games on my Pandora pretty awkward. One of the emus has no front end and I'm not even sure if you can change disks whilst it's on, and I don't remember being too successful with the other. That could have just been my setup was wrong, or the games I was trying.
 
^But that's the emulator issue not the pandora issue :)   By the way, I fixed my post too :)
 
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Shenmue said:
^But that's the emulator issue not the pandora issue :)   By the way, I fixed my post too :)
Click to expand...
True, but if the goal was about playing Amiga games it doesn't matter how good the Pandora is if the Amiga emulators aren't up to scratch.

As stated, I don't know if it was just something about my setup, so I'm not sure really how good the emulators are
 
Hmm UA4ALL works on almost everything I've thrown at it.. Navigating the menus can be a little odd, but found it worked fairly well.
 
Amiga emulation is certainly great on the Pandora IMO, with the ltest release of UAE4ALL  eulation is running almost flawlessly at stock A1200 AGA levels. You can reasonably easily set up hard drives, or for a more direct experience install TinyLauncher. The community here are very friendly and helpful and you'll get plenty of support with issues from developers and fellow users alike. Although it wasn't the only reason I wanted it, this idea of a portable Amiga was one of my main reasons for ordering the Pandora originally too
 
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