Amiga FS-UAE Game Emulator

[Cas]

http://fengestad.no/wp/fs-uae

A multi-platform Amiga emulator

FS-UAE is an Amiga emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X based on UAE/WinUAE, with a focus on emulating games.


Features include emulation of Amiga 500, 1200, 4000, CD32 and CDTV, perfectly smooth scrolling on 50Hz displays, support for floppy images in ADF and IPF formats, CD-ROM images in ISO or BIN/CUE format, mounting folders on your computer as Amiga hard drives, support for Picasso 96 drivers for high-color and high-resolution Workbench displays, and more…


A unique feature is support for cross-platform online play. You can now play Amiga games against (or with) friends over the Internet.


The emulator uses the latest Amiga emulation code from the WinUAE project and requires a moderately fast computer with accelerated graphics (OpenGL) to work. A game pad or joystick is recommended, but not required (FS-UAE can emulate a joystick using the cursor keys and right ctrl/alt keys).


FS-UAE is fully controllable with a gamepad, with an on-screen GUI, which means that you can easily swap floppies and load save states with your gamepad. In addition to being great on your personal computer, FS-UAE is also well suited to be started from an emulator frontend running on a HTPC.

Don't know if already reported here.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Hey FrodeSolheim, seems it's you the dev of fs-uae ^^.


How did you know this thread ? You looked at your website logs ?

Yes I am, and the site showed up on the referrals list, so I checked it out of curiosity . Haven't got a Pandora though.

If you had a pandora would you consider doing a port for the pandora?It looks like a top emulator.

 

[FrodeSolheim]

Did you heard of Pandora before ?


Do you know it's made in Germany ?


What do you think about the error log ?

Yes, and yes (read it yesterday), and you can copy ALIGN_POINTER_TO32 from machdep/x86/maccess.h to machdep/arm/maccess.h.


You won't be able to fully compile and run FS-UAE as is, by the way. For instance, the wikipedia entry says that the hardware is OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible. FS-UAE uses features of OpenGL which is not present in OpenGL ES, so a OpenGL ES renderer must be written...


Also, I would be worried about performance. A 600 Mhz ARM processor sounds a bit weak for a modern UAE core (disclaimer: I have never tried running it on a 600 Mhz ARM processor, or any ARM processor...)

 

[FrodeSolheim]

If you had a pandora would you consider doing a port for the pandora?It looks like a top emulator.

Well, the Pandora looks sweet, and if I was convinced it would be fast enough, sure. It would make a *very* nice portable Amiga. But as I said, I have doubts about the performance (too bad it doesn't have a dual-core 1.5 Ghz ARM processor, or something ;-)).

 

[sebt3]

Well, the Pandora looks sweet, and if I was convinced it would be fast enough, sure. It would make a *very* nice portable Amiga. But as I said, I have doubts about the performance (too bad it doesn't have a dual-core 1.5 Ghz ARM processor, or something ;-)).

We already have UAE4ALL that run fullspeed easyly, but maybe your emulator is less optimized (or more complete).


At least we know it look doable

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

If you had a pandora would you consider doing a port for the pandora?It looks like a top emulator.

Well, the Pandora looks sweet, and if I was convinced it would be fast enough, sure. It would make a *very* nice portable Amiga. But as I said, I have doubts about the performance (too bad it doesn't have a dual-core 1.5 Ghz ARM processor, or something ;-)).

Really.I thought the old amiga games wouldn't require that much power to run? It would make a very nice portable amiga.Would you consider porting it if feasible.The amiga is only the best computer ever made.We could lend you a pandora maybe.

 

[FrodeSolheim]

Well, the Pandora looks sweet, and if I was convinced it would be fast enough, sure. It would make a *very* nice portable Amiga. But as I said, I have doubts about the performance (too bad it doesn't have a dual-core 1.5 Ghz ARM processor, or something ;-)).

We already have UAE4ALL that run fullspeed easyly, but maybe your emulator is less optimized (or more complete).

Well, 14 years ago (or something), UAE ran fine on my 200 Mhz Pentium. UAE, and WinUAE which FS-UAE is based on, has been developed further since then, and has now higher compatibility (better emulation) at the expense of performance. Which makes senses, since computers get faster and faster, and more accuracte emulation is a good thing. I assume UAE4all is based on an older (faster, less compatible) UAE version, and probably with optimizations for embedded processors.


I have an Galaxy Nexus (Android phone), and when I get the time, I will probably try to make a minimal port to Android to see how well it runs on such hardware. But this device has a dual-core 1.2 Ghz ARM processor, so better chance of getting decent performance here.

 

[ZXDunny]

Round our way, the Pandora is known as the "Sabre Toothed Console" because it's so long in the tooth. Don't expect miracles, especially with the 2.3.x or 2.4.x codebase.


D.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Id bet that it could be done on pandora though it might take some work.The current uae4all is ta terrible emulator with broken game compatability, glitches and alot of pain.I can't use it anymore.

 

[ZXDunny]

Id bet that it could be done on pandora though it might take some work.The current uae4all is ta terrible emulator with broken game compatability, glitches and alot of pain.I can't use it anymore.

FS-UAE has excellent compatibility - much better than UAE4All. That comes at a hell of a price though. I think you will probably get reasonable A500 performance, though some frameskip will be necessary. You can forget A1200 emulation though, that will never reach an emulated 14MHz on our dated and very poor CPU.


D.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

...you can copy ALIGN_POINTER_TO32 from machdep/x86/maccess.h to machdep/arm/maccess.h.


You won't be able to fully compile and run FS-UAE as is, by the way. For instance, the wikipedia entry says that the hardware is OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible. FS-UAE uses features of OpenGL which is not present in OpenGL ES, so a OpenGL ES renderer must be written...


Also, I would be worried about performance. A 600 Mhz ARM processor sounds a bit weak for a modern UAE core (disclaimer: I have never tried running it on a 600 Mhz ARM processor, or any ARM processor...)

Ok, so i'll stop tries here.


You should not underestimate the Pandora ^^. Can easily go to 800MHz, and some boards goes to 1.1GHz.


For example, take a look at this:

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Ah ok Cas.


Any moderator can merge the threads ?

 

[F_Slim]

It always amazes me that we can run basically any Playstation game at 600MHz, but Amiga-emulation is such a challenge.

 

[FrodeSolheim]

Id bet that it could be done on pandora though it might take some work.The current uae4all is ta terrible emulator with broken game compatability, glitches and alot of pain.I can't use it anymore.

The slowest computer I've got has an Intel Atom 270 CPU @1.6Ghz. An unscientific benchmark says that this CPU can run the emulation at about 70 fps (A500, at low accuracy level). With some sacrifices (accept some tearing, copy less frame data, etc, some more fps would be possible). Of course, you cannot just compare MHz... -I don't know how fast the 600Mhz ARM processor in the Pandora is compared to this CPU.

 

[ZXDunny]

It always amazes me that we can run basically any Playstation game at 600MHz, but Amiga-emulation is such a challenge.

The key issue is that of dynarec, or in this specific case, the lack of JIT which powers WinUAE on low powered platforms. Our PSX emulator converts chunks of playstation-specific code to ARM code and executes those natively, which provides the efficiency - and conversely the lack of JIT (which is pretty much the same thing) for 680x0 emulation and a native 68k dynarec means that Amiga emulation is pretty damned slow on ARM cpus.


D.

 

[Prometheus]

Ah ok Cas.


Any moderator can merge the threads ?


http://boards.openpa...-game-emulator/

Done.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

It always amazes me that we can run basically any Playstation game at 600MHz, but Amiga-emulation is such a challenge.

The key issue is that of dynarec, or in this specific case, the lack of JIT which powers WinUAE on low powered platforms. Our PSX emulator converts chunks of playstation-specific code to ARM code and executes those natively, which provides the efficiency - and conversely the lack of JIT (which is pretty much the same thing) for 680x0 emulation and a native 68k dynarec means that Amiga emulation is pretty damned slow on ARM cpus.


D.

Damn that's bad news.Amiga emulation isn't really possible on the pandora at all so. Might try this emu on my laptop then.Ive heard that it was only recently that pcs were able to properly emulate the amiga os and such at proper speeds.Is this a similar issue.The old miggy(wonder machine that it is) must need a lot of grunt to be successfully emulated.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Bump. So now that we have 1ghz+ pandoras this amiga emulator has a chance of running on the pandora I think.what do ye think?


I have messaged frodesolheim on EAB about the 1ghz pandora.If he's game we could give him a 1ghz pandora.Id donate some money for such a thing too.maybe he would make it available for a dev here to port it to the pandora and maintain it.

 

[rSl]

i really *love* fs-uae on the (x86) pc!

here is some news i found regarding the pandora port http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=66934

big thanks to lallafa !