Amiga Emulator for Dreamcast!

[it290]

Chui has released a port of the Amiga emulator UAE to the Dreamcast! Although still in its early stages, progress is coming along nicely... this is too awesome for words.

Current status:

- Amiga500 with 1MB RAM.

- Frameskip 1 close to real speed.

- Menu System: select frameskip, sound, throttle...

- Filemanager (load and reload floppy images).

- Virtual Keyboard.

- Emulate joysticks and mouse.

- Preliminar Sound (not clean and slow a bit).

I'm stoked.. time to dust off some of my favorite classic demos and games...

 

[Alexvrb]

I'd give it a little more time to cook.

 

[it290]

Yeah, it's pretty preliminary right now (especially the sound), but still awesome. I don't think fullspeed is really that likely (Amiga emulation is really demanding, since the timing must be precise w/the custom chips)... but it's still awesome to watch State of the Art, 3D Demo ][, Jesus on E's, etc. on a television set.

 

[racketboy]

go, little white box, go!

 

[Alexvrb]

Full speed emulation of an Amiga 500 without sound is absolutely possible, he's already fairly close. With sound, I still think it is possible, just difficult. Remember, he hasn't optimized the code yet. He's just trying to get a functioning port of UAE up and running. So far so good, I think he wants to fix the major bugs and improve basic functionality before he dives into anything else. He may eventually be able to replace the 68k core, but from what I understand it is pretty heavily integrated into the emulator, the way UAE is coded. We'll see.

Oh, and although it is on the back burner right now, he (Chui) is the main driving force behind that Atari ST emu as well. Though I am sure you're well aware of this.

 

[it290]

The problem is that sound is an essential component of the Amiga..... I don't know, I just don't see it happening. The 68K core in UAE is the way it is because of the fact that the timing has to be precise between the custom chips and the CPU. If not, OS-compliant things will work fine, but a lot of other stuff (ie, the stuff people are interested in) will break. Trust me, even an A500 with a 68020 won't run a lot of stuff. Most of the speedy Amiga emulation solutions on the PC have involved JIT approaches, but that won't really work for most demos and the like.

 

[ExCyber]

Amiga doesn't really have much in the way of sound-specific hardware, does it? I mean nothing like FM synthesis, noise generator, or ring modulation. It's pretty much just 4 variable-rate DMA channels, isn't it?

 

[it290]

Yes, the sound hardware is fairly simplistic. I think it might have some form of FM synthesis, but I'm not sure about that point. What I meant was that the sound is essential from a user's point of view -- for me anyway, there's just not too much point to emulating an Amiga without fairly accurate sound emulation.

 

[axelblazeadam]

Wow we have an Amiga emulator up against an Atari St emu. That takes me back.

I was on the ST side, it was the first system I ever owned, and it was my first taste of Sega as it had Outrun.Space Harrier, Super Hang On and Afterburner amonst the 30+ games it came with.

 

[it290]

axelblazeadam- don't make me flame you, man. 😉

 

[Alexvrb]

He'll do it, too. He's a big flamer.

 

[it290]

Alexvrb- as the song says, man - "Windows 95? Get a life."