Oh, by the way, fDave, since you coded Cyclone68000, could you create an Amiga emulator...?
I need it this evening, thanks
Back to Ontopic:
That's the spirit fDave... just sort those bugreports out and ignore the "I want! I need! It's uncomplete!"-posts
Thanks again for your great work
As far as an Amiga emulator, don't count on it. The GP32 or any other handheld is simply not strong enough to do it. The 68000 is only a small part of the Amiga chipset. You have the blitter, copper, 4 channel stereo sound, a multitasking OS, it is just too much.
I think a full speed no frameskip Atari ST w/full sound is certainly doable though. While not an Amiga, it is the next best thing.
Do you know I'm itching to find out about the extra hardware in the famed Amiga.... it's kind of like a continuation of the old Atari ST versus Amiga battles of yesterday.
"My Amiga is SOOO much harder to emulate than your crappy Atari ST"
...what can be in this beast which means even Cyclone cannot handle it?
I want to know why
4 channel stereo sound and a multitasking OS? Well the OS is software not hardware, so that isn't even releveant is it? And as for 4-channel stereo sound, well the MD has 10 channels, and even the speccy 128 has 4, so I don't see why that's a huge drawback. hell i'll bet the C64 is more complicated.
No the only thing I can see is this Copper or Blitter thing, and if they aren't as powerful as a flipping Pentium-4 then it's going to be a serious letdown for the Amiga-nah-sayers!
I thought this post was about gpdrive but it seems that people started discussing the amiga...
so I would like to put my 50c in regarding amiga emulation (I used to program the amiga using assembly many many years ago).
Some info about the various custom chips in the various amiga models are here:
http://amiga.emugaming.com/customchips.html
(far from all chips are in a standard amiga 500)
Basically, perfect emulation of the amiga is difficult since nearly all of the chips are used in any single game. OS stuff like multi tasking is simple since it is standard round robbin stuff with timers and Sound is simple too since it is not FM based but used samples.....
The GFX is a whole other matter:
Resolution wise only 320x200 variants need to be supported, since only the workbench use other resolutions... color modes same thing....
Nearly all games use 32/16/8 color modes with one or two playfields.
Sprites are the same 16 by user selected height pixel size for all resolutions.
Copper needs to be implemented completely, copper is basically a word memory mover synchronized to screen, so its dead simple. Blitter needs at least a fairly complete implementation, the blitter is a block mover... non vector games use simpler copying modes of blitter, so for most games that part of blitter operation would be enough.
For anyone that is interested in FAST amiga emulation, look at sources for Winfellow... it actually ran pretty good speed on a 486 and very good speed on a 300mhz pc.
GFX handling parts are in PC assembly for speed.... porting the most used gfx rendering to get a few demos/games running is not impossible...
For instance this function renders one line segment for two playfields...
void drawLineDual1x16mmx(graph_line *linedescription)
...and so on....
If there was a C version of fellow to start working with and selectively optimizing the most used things, getting it to run reasonably fast on a GP32/Zodiac/etc. would not be impossible. The current source in 100% assembly for all gfx code is not as easy to port....
Using UAE as the base for fast speed probably is impossible since they are going for cycle exact emulation, which is much more time consuming.
Fellow is good enough for nearly all games, but fast enough for slow hardware.... but a port would still be really difficult...
As I said thats my 50 cents on amiga emulation, dont have the time to work on it myself though....
