Amiga Emulation


grooveholmes posted on Dec 28 2004 at 12:43 PM said:
yes.
www.winuae.net

it's near perfect and finally reaching version 1.0. after looooong times of improvements. it has awesome flexible compatibility (which sometimes get frustrating because of lots of options) but there are downloadable config files for games and apps.

Aaaand it is able to simulate the old diskdrive sound.
I loooooooooove that :)
 
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Syndicate is on Genesis... no idea how it compares to the Amiga version, but I remember being one of the better genesis games back then if you were into that style of game.
 
EvilDragon posted on Dec 27 2004 at 01:11 AM said:
trooper posted on Dec 27 2004 at 01:57 AM said:
Just a couple of games not avalable on any other systen emulated by the GP32.

Fire & Ice
Cadaver
Rodland
Walker
X-out
Z-out


Don't know about the other games, but these DO exist for the Atari ST.
Don't know if they're good (as I, too, was an Amiga guy) nor if they work on Castaway, but they do exist.

walker isnt out on ST
 
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moz posted on Dec 28 2004 at 06:36 PM said:
EvilDragon posted on Dec 27 2004 at 01:11 AM said:
trooper posted on Dec 27 2004 at 01:57 AM said:
Just a couple of games not avalable on any other systen emulated by the GP32.

Fire & Ice
Cadaver
Rodland
Walker
X-out
Z-out


Don't know about the other games, but these DO exist for the Atari ST.
Don't know if they're good (as I, too, was an Amiga guy) nor if they work on Castaway, but they do exist.

walker isnt out on ST

Whoops, yeah, I forgot to delete it from the list ;)
 
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bast525 posted on Dec 28 2004 at 06:24 PM said:
Syndicate is on Genesis... no idea how it compares to the Amiga version, but I remember being one of the better genesis games back then if you were into that style of game.

SNES had a version, too. Compared to the PC version I used to play, it was pure crap. You couldn't "persuade" me to play it again.
 
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i still refuse to believe its impossible

*puts fingers in ears* la la laa laaaa la la la

I want UFO : enemy unkown so somone do it, make an emulator now!!! i command you!!!!

God i bloody wish it was possible :(


*looks at what was just written*


god im an idiot, please forgive my mindless shite talking
 
feddon posted on Dec 28 2004 at 11:34 PM said:
I want UFO : enemy unkown so somone do it, make an emulator now!!! i command you!!!!


I remember playing that a lot back in the day - I recently started it up again on my CD32, to re-live the joy of this first game of this series (been a fan of the entire series).

I played it for hours... but the turns does seem to take forever. It makes you realise how much the real-time-system improves the game.
 
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i love my cd32 play it much more than my gamecube, cant get enough of the old amiga. ive got a cd with bout 500 amiga500 games on for it bu ive also got the keyboard and diskdrive and i have shitloads of amiga goodies to play on it.

love it to bits, i love it so much i actually have 2 for no particular reason, backup i suppose...
 
grooveholmes posted on Dec 29 2004 at 01:53 AM said:
Aaaand it is able to simulate the old diskdrive sound.
I loooooooooove that

did amiga had that too? c64 had a drivemusic thing. i was shocked when i first tried it.

What EvilDragon was talking about was in UAE, when it is loading from the disk image it emulates the sounds the drive would make (as if it was loading on a real Amiga).

What you're thinking of is totally different. I had that C64 drive music program too. Sounded cool but a real quick & easy way to wreck your drive heads.
 
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Even if you could emulate the 68000 at 7MHz, you'd have to have a whole separate subroutine for each custom chip, Paula, Agnus, Denise, and Gary, emulate the hardware also... Mouse/Joy/Floppy...

If we take a REALISTIC look at it, it would be a huge chunk of cycles just to get the GARY (graphics) and DENISE (sound) chips working fast enough to keep up. I'm guessing at LEAST 25MHz per chip for decent emulation. AGNUS and PAULA are memory handling and I/O control through two other chips, designated EVEN CIA and ODD CIA. *Shrug* I have no idea what to give those chips. For the sake of argument, we'll give 'em 25MHz for both of them. So far, that's about 75MHz dedicated to sorting out the custom chips alone. To emulate the 68000 itself, I'm guessing about 50MHz at least.

Even at 166MHz that only leaves about 40 MHz to handle the Real-time clock, floppy emulation (auto-insert notification), O/S rom handling and any O/S ROM patching routines that need to run. Also I have no clue if the graphics chip (GARY) handles the mouse cursor routines, so you might have to put some cpu time into that.

Even if it were possible, it would run so slow, I'd be amazed if you have enough RAM left or enough CPU speed to run anything.
I know nothing about coding or programming, but I've owned 3 Amigas, all the A500 type, 2 with HD's.

EDIT: (NOTE: Small chance I MAY have gotten DENISE and PAULA chips reversed, but I doubt it. Still effectively the values and amounts just reverse too)
 
Lets get realistic...

The best emulation loop I've ever seen for any processor was the ARM running 6502 code at about a 4:1 ratio. Thats a 4MHz ARM running 6502 code at 1MHz. That was, however, without interrupt servicing or emulating any other external hardware. I believe the rule-of-thumb is 10:1 for any given processor. To handle a complex CPU like the 68000, you're looking at about 72MHz (the actual speed was 7.16MHz, double the colourburst) needed for the processor alone.

The SEGA Genesis emulation needs 144MHz to run at full speed. That's a good starting point for comparison. That's 20-times the speed of the CPU alone - but the Genesis employed a simple standard screen mode with a fixed number of sprites and a non-unified memory architecture. The sound was provided by a simple FM chip which is only a notch above Apple II sound (send beeps faster or slower with a 1uF cap). Even with the pedantic Z80 being emulated, the Genesis is a far cry from an Amiga. Anyway, for comparison;

The Amiga display supported a myriad of display modes, truely limited only by the programmers imagination. The basic resolutions were 320H up to 64 colours, or 640H up to 16 colours. This could be either 200 (NTSC) or 256 (PAL) lines long, or doubled if interlaced. Then, you could change some palette entries on the horizontal refresh. Or change the resolution on the fly. Or the base pointer to repleat scanlines, move back up the display (to create cool mirror effects easily), and more. This was all done by the copper - a colourburst clocked processor which changed anyone Amiga register per cycle. ECS chipsets added the ability to also control the blitter with the copper allowing CPU-less line graphics, etc. Additionally there were funky modes like HAM, which allowed 4096 colour screens and various software hacks for even 4096 colour hires screens, or horizontall splite lowres-hires screens, interlaced sprites and more.

To emulate this behaviour accurately, you need cycle exact emulation. That means, at 3.58MHz, you need to run one copper instruction, perform a DMA fetch for video (and other) data, convert that to a native display format (16bit RGB) and then emit that to the LCD display. Even if you cheat by doing a scanline at a time, you're probably talking about 20-30 instructions per cycle (thats like 7000 instructions to emit a correct scanline), or upwards of 100MHz consumed for the copper/display routine. I need to emphasise that this is IDEAL situations - Fellow approached this level of efficiency. WinUAE does not.

Then there's the blitter - which makes the bitblt on modern PCs look simple. It supports huge DMA moves, with four channels and optional combinational logic to be applied to each source and/or destination. It also included simple line drawing and the strange xor fill. This would need to be emulated too. On the Amiga, there was no speed drop when performing a blit - it operated in conjuction with everything else.

Sprites. Wow, did some people know how to abuse these. I still don't know how games like Blood Money make use of 19 sprites, each much larger than the "allowed" Amiga sprite dimensions, with many one one scanline, with no flicker. Sprites were DMA objects and could also check for pixel-level collisions which eachother and/or the playfield. Oh yeah - dual playfields. You could split the bit planes and have, for example, a 2 bit background bitmap, and a 4 bit foreground. Each playfield could be infront or behind sprites, and playing with this in real time made for some cool effects (like unsprites).

Sheesh. I haven't even mentioned sound yet. Stupid PCM on the Genesis. Awesome 8bit four channel sound on the Amiga, with 6bit volume control. While "lame" to some PC users, this could do things PC cards still can't do - like play any sample at any playback rate without the CPU. For example, a piano sound could be sampled at C, but played back at any note with zero (absolutely ZERO) CPU interference. Then came all the tricks - like playing with the volume and mixing stereo channels to get 14bit DMA sound. Sounded pretty good too. Probably the most trivial component in the Amiga... LOL. It also supported C64 like mixing where one channel could modify the other channels frequency or volume, etc...

Then there's diskdrive emulation, joystick, keyboard and mouse control. It should be mentioned that the Amiga had an actual quadrature decoder in the system, not on the mouse itself. You could actually read and monitor these signals.

All things said, I would expect the GP32 to fall short on ever comming close to an Amiga. Atari users like to say their systems were just as complex - maybe sometimes almost as capable (though Blood Money on the Atari shows that no, no it's not), but not even close to as complex. Whether this is a good thing or not is subjective - the Amiga could do things PC still don't (pull down screens anyone?) - but it all came at a price.

I'd venture to guess, hell, I'd even wager (and I'd pony up a lot!!) that not only could a full speed Amiga500 emulator never be made for a GP32, I would add that neither could it be on any handheld platform available today or in the near future. 600MHz ARM isn't enough. A custom graphics chip may help, but not much. And FPGA on a handheld isn't realistic yet.

TTFN.

-- nonarKitten

Winterkid posted on Dec 28 2004 at 10:38 PM said:
Even if you could emulate the 68000 at 7MHz, you'd have to have a whole separate subroutine for each custom chip, Paula, Agnus, Denise, and Gary, emulate the hardware also... Mouse/Joy/Floppy...

If we take a REALISTIC look at it, it would be a huge chunk of cycles just to get the GARY (graphics) and DENISE (sound) chips working fast enough to keep up. I'm guessing at LEAST 25MHz per chip for decent emulation. AGNUS and PAULA are memory handling and I/O control through two other chips, designated EVEN CIA and ODD CIA. *Shrug* I have no idea what to give those chips. For the sake of argument, we'll give 'em 25MHz for both of them. So far, that's about 75MHz dedicated to sorting out the custom chips alone. To emulate the 68000 itself, I'm guessing about 50MHz at least.

Even at 166MHz that only leaves about 40 MHz to handle the Real-time clock, floppy emulation (auto-insert notification), O/S rom handling and any O/S ROM patching routines that need to run. Also I have no clue if the graphics chip (GARY) handles the mouse cursor routines, so you might have to put some cpu time into that.

Even if it were possible, it would run so slow, I'd be amazed if you have enough RAM left or enough CPU speed to run anything.
I know nothing about coding or programming, but I've owned 3 Amigas, all the A500 type, 2 with HD's.

EDIT: (NOTE: Small chance I MAY have gotten DENISE and PAULA chips reversed, but I doubt it. Still effectively the values and amounts just reverse too)
 
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nonarKitten, I'm sensing some real Amiga love from you ;). Thanks for the info that was a very interesting post.
 
I agree with Reesy. A very informative post, nonarKitten.

The most authoratitive post yet about Amiga emulation and should put to rest any suggestions it will ever be feasible on our beloved GP32.

Should pin it somewhere, I reckon :)
 
Uh, who owns the trademark at the moment? Some german company? Well, I think one of the owners was considering bringing back C64 for the east european markets... :)

Where could one buy CD32? :eek:


Edit: Just heard from TV, some company called "Yeahronimo" ( :rolleyes: ) has bought the Commodore brand for $33m... For portable MP3 players and such.


CBMlogo.gif


Long Live Commodore!!! :lol:
 
feddon posted on Dec 29 2004 at 01:26 AM said:
i love my cd32 play it much more than my gamecube, cant get enough of the old amiga. ive got a cd with bout 500 amiga500 games on for it bu ive also got the keyboard and diskdrive and i have shitloads of amiga goodies to play on it.

500 Amiga games? I've got a 200 game CD (permantly mounted)... allthough this is all sorts of things like Demos, A500 games and CD32 games. Since most CD32 titles are using CD-audio the CD32 games on the compliaction are lacking music, which is a big no-no on an Amiga...

I've would be much happier with a CD entirely with A500 games - And the CD I've got is actually lacking some mayor titles like Wings of Fury, Nuclear War, Worms and Stardust (well, It HAS got Super Stardust, but again... no music)... and it's missing others... but I can't remember them just now

How are the games that require keybord or mouse handled? Are they remapped for the controller? I Know this is possible for some games running under Workbench.
 
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dunno ive got a mouse and keyboard to use if i need them, havnt really tryed the contoller for thos types of games.
 
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