Release Fullspeed Amiga Emulation On Pandora!

[drewster]

Mmm Kick Off 2

 

[Stainy]

Mmm Kick Off 2

Yep!! with the keyboard though!!

 

[jaycee900]

For me it'd bb Bubba 'n' Stix, D-Generation, Pinball Fantasies, Alien Breed 3D, James Pond 3 and Super Skidmarks




...as most developers did just ported the A500/1200 version straight to disc.



To be fair to most of the developers many CD32 titles (Super Skidmarks included) were released after Commodore went bankrupt, and there were no new machines being created. It would have been a lot for them to put all the effort into re-doing all the graphics specifically for the CD32 version. The Skidmarks develpers may have also faced RAM issues with running all the different cars/2 player modes etc in AGA screenmodes. Didn't the CD32 version at least have a HI-Res mode? Or did I just dream that?

(start edit...) on the flip side, the fact that many CD32 titles were of ECS games means less work will be needed to make at least SOME of the CD32 titles work on Pandora! All that will need to be emulated will be the ECS chipset and a bootable CD-Rom drive. Then if AGA comes later down the line, that should open up the rest of the games - aside from the single game which uses the Akiko chip Microcosm? I don't remember)!(...end edit)

I don't recall the demo. Do you remember which magazine it was on?

Yeah it was the future publishing CD32 mag, the one with only two issues, i think it was issue 1, it looked so much better than the final product, if the demo had these graphics i don't see how ram issues would have got in the way...?
Back on topic though, like some people have said, its all very well having a Amiga emu on a PDA/GP2x/Giz but without proper keyboard, mouse controls and full resolution then its not the way by a long shot, plus cant enter hack codes for one! The Amiga was the greatest and innovative gaming machine in history and I for one am buying a Pandora for this main reason...

 

[Pleng]

Yeah it was the future publishing CD32 mag, the one with only two issues, i think it was issue 1




Ahh I think I still have that in my collection. I'll try and dig it out and have a look.

QUOTE

, it looked so much better than the final product, if the demo had these graphics i don't see how ram issues would have got in the way...?


This is why I'd like to see the demo. Could be that the demo only allowed 4 cars, or low-res graphics. Perhaps it didn't offer split-screen 2 player mode. All these factors would add up to a lot less RAM being used and therefore enough RAM left over for a 265 colour background and cars.

QUOTE

Back on topic though, like some people have said, its all very well having a Amiga emu on a PDA/GP2x/Giz but without proper keyboard, mouse controls and full resolution then its not the way by a long shot, plus cant enter hack codes for one! The Amiga was the greatest and innovative gaming machine in history and I for one am buying a Pandora for this main reason...



Amen to that! UAE on my PC feels, well, clumsy. It is functional, however. But I do not do any gaming on my main computer. All games are run on my downstairs computer which is hooked up to a TV with a composite output, making UAE menus awkward to navigate, especially as my keyboard is hidden away behind the back of the telly, only to be used for emergencies.

The Pandora will be far, far more elegant of a solution!

 

[White Demon]

Didn't the CD32 version at least have a HI-Res mode? Or did I just dream that?

I can't say for sure (as I never had a CD32), but it probably did, since it is in the AGA (A1200) version that I have.

 

[JayFoxRox]

You should make cuts in the video more obvious, you always show us some emulators or games running, which could easily be pre-recorded on another device, maybe even added by video editing software. I know that this is probably not the case, but it is still weird: The games change, without anyone touching the Pandora, without showing a menu screen and the new game boots right into demo-mode.
If you want to show us what the Pandora can do, you shouldn't just have the Pandora case as video-frame, show us how you start games from beginning until the demo-mode, or something similar and maybe show us how you start these games etc (I know it is usually done via remote command line but hey - still better than nothing). It was pretty good in a previous video (but you also cut there...). Simply put the Pandora next to the PC (Monitor) used for booting these games and record both.

 

[fade]

I agree on the portable thing, it just opens it up in a new way.

Sitting at my PC with 500 or so ADF files going though each one is kinda a chore, but lying in bed with an SD packed with ADF files trying each one will be fantastic. It just seems more fun, more like having an Amiga in my bedroom aged 14 all over again.

I also like the way it will all 'just work' ie the keyboard and mouse and controls. I hate the way the PC always has windows or control issues in the way.

Absolutely. Its the portable aspect of it that makes it very appealing. We all know that we can play Amiga games full speed on our PC's, laptops or whatever. But its simply not the same as being able to relax and enjoy some amiga classics anywhere you want, running perfectly on something that fits it your pocket.

 

[Dunny]

As others have said, it's only taken 20 years for there to be a really *portable* amiga! But it looks good. These days much better for playing old games rather than old apps but still not bad. It's either that or well.....try fitting an Amiga 500 into an old SX64 case and carry that about. Definately not portable. And yes, that existed, if only in prototype form (see SX500) ....

Back in 1993/4 I worked for a company called "ASG" (Applied Systems Group) at Elsham Wold industrial estate in north lincolnshire. I worked as a general dogsbody, but one of my duties was the advertisement media for the laptop Amiga they had developed. There are, to my certain knowledge, 3 out there somewhere. One was bought by a guy who sold carpets on the road

They were a vanilla A1200 (top of the range affordable miggy back then) with 120mb HDD attached to the internal IDE port, with no other mods attached. The keyboard was the original A1200 keys inside a custom (wooden) case. The screen was a full 640x512 LCD with custom-made flicker fixer and speakers in the lid. It was an amazing machine, though quite bulky but surprisingly light. The battery onboard would last about an hour, and would need to be plugged in (still needed the brick PSU) usually during use. There was also a small trackball mouse in the lower half, with all other i/o ports available.

I'd love to see one again, but can't find any trace of it on the web - we were all on compuserve back then, as there was no internet (well, no WWW, that is) to speak of.

The demo disk I made with full specs and animations of the thing went out to a good few hundred customers, but I can't trace anyone (not that many customers come to memory after all this time).

The case was made of black ash wood - our internal slogan being "I can't believe it's not an MFI cabinet".

D.

 

[WizardStan]

the case was made of wood? All it needed was to be steam powered and it would have been perfect!

 

[Dunny]

the case was made of wood? All it needed was to be steam powered and it would have been perfect!

It was indeed

Hence our comment about MFI cabinets. The prototype was in rosewood as I recall, it was lovely. The final productions were in this awful black ash, but what the hell - it was a portable Amiga, and how cool is that?

I'm gonna have to do some serious digging and see if I can find some more info on it.

D.

 

[craigix]

They were building these by hand? How much did they cost?

 

[jaycee900]

How many ADf files do you guys keep at once? I'm going through the web writing down all the games i remember owning all the all the other ones that were great but i never got round to buying, its looking like I'll end up with 500 games from my lists.

 

[Chip]

How many ADf files do you guys keep at once?

~21k, but a lot are dupes.

 

[Dunny]

They were building these by hand? How much did they cost?

A shade under £1,000 iirc. They were very, very expensive. And yes, they were made by hand. The cases were made by a small company that specialised in furniture round the corner

D.

 

[craigix]

I've got a couple of DVDs of Amiga games me and some friends converted in to ADZ files, I used to sell them on CD (back before that was frowned upon) and so did many many PD CD-Rom distributors via the quarter page ads in the back of PC mags.

Paid for a year of college.

I've still got boxes of amiga disks but I don't think they would work after all this time. Would be fantastic to hook up an amiga exteral disk drive and run them direct on the pandora! That is the kind of geeky thing which would put a smile on my face. Click click click...

 

[sam fisher]

You went to college?

 

[Wilhood]

I've got a couple of DVDs of Amiga games me and some friends converted in to ADZ files, I used to sell them on CD (back before that was frowned upon) and so did many many PD CD-Rom distributors via the quarter page ads in the back of PC mags.

Paid for a year of college.

I've still got boxes of amiga disks but I don't think they would work after all this time. Would be fantastic to hook up an amiga exteral disk drive and run them direct on the pandora! That is the kind of geeky thing which would put a smile on my face. Click click click...

yeah i remember buying some cds off your website years ago

 

[Pleng]

I've got a couple of DVDs of Amiga games me and some friends converted in to ADZ files, I used to sell them on CD (back before that was frowned upon) and so did many many PD CD-Rom distributors via the quarter page ads in the back of PC mags.

Paid for a year of college.

I've still got boxes of amiga disks but I don't think they would work after all this time. Would be fantastic to hook up an amiga exteral disk drive and run them direct on the pandora!

Hmmm I wonder why nobody ever designed an Amiga Floppy-USB adapter? Seems like an obvious candidate seeing as the PC floppy controller can't handle Amiga disks. Makes a lot morse sense then those messy internal catweazles!

QUOTE

That is the kind of geeky thing which would put a smile on my face. Click click click...



Yup, and you KNOW that the first utility you'd install would be the NoClick!

 

[GnoStiC]

(USB) Amiga Floppy

BUT there is no need for that.. we have adfread (adfread @ winuae.net)

QUOTE
This utility will allow you to create ADF floppy disk images from regular Amiga disks using standard PC hardware.

Requirements
- Windows 2000/XP/2003
- BIOS support for 2 floppy drives
- 2 non-USB floppy drives installed on the same cable
- Regular format Amiga disks without any copy-protection
- A normal PC-formatted 1.44M floppy

Hmmm I wonder why nobody ever designed an Amiga Floppy-USB adapter? Seems like an obvious candidate seeing as the PC floppy controller can't handle Amiga disks. Makes a lot morse sense then those messy internal catweazles!

 

[chaos engineer]

what I would like to see on pandora is an amiga emulator with hdd support. This would allow us to play the games via whdload what reduces the loading times ernormously. whdload would perfectly fit to a handheld machine. The best thing of course would be if I could duplicate my A1200 (blizzard 1260) on pandora. but one have to be modest

If hdd support is not possible then I suggest to add a save state function. I have always found this disk drive loading on amiga emulators rather stressful. On the original A500 the beats of the disk drive are music in my ears ;-)