Amiga emulation
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- This article is about emulating the classic Amiga computer on modern computer platforms. For information on emulating legacy computers on the Amiga platform itself, see Emulation on the Amiga.
Amiga emulation refers to the activity of emulating (mimicking the hardware of) a Commodore Amiga computer system using another computer platform. Most commonly, a user will emulate the Amiga using modern platforms such as Wintel or Macintosh. This allows Amiga users to use their existing software, and in some cases hardware, on modern computers.
A few dedicated Amiga users have taken this even further by writing hardware Amiga emulators for common FPGA chips [1].
One of the most challenging part of emulating the Amiga architecture is the emulation of the custom chipset, which is extremely complex (even though today's graphic processors and digital signal processors outperform it easily) and becomes critical when cycle-exact emulation is required, such as in a few games.
[edit] Amiga Emulators
At the time of writing there exists no emulator capable of emulating an Amiga with PowerPC accelerator (PPC Amiga). Arguably there is no need for PPC emulation because an emulated Amiga can run 68K software just as fast, if not faster, than what can be achieved through PPC emulation.
[edit] Fellow
An actively developed emulator capable of emulating all the common Amiga configurations. (A500, A600, etc...)
Available at:
[edit] Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator (UAE)
Although the name varies, this emulator exists for Windows, Macintosh, Unix and other systems, including the Amiga itself. It is capable of emulating an 68K Amiga, including undocumented behaviour, with OCS, AGA chipsets and modern graphics and audio subsystems, including Picasso96 graphic libraries and Amiga AHI 16 bit audio subsystem.
Windows version called WinUAE has gained a JITM (Just In Time Machine) emulator, which replicates right on the fly the behaviour of a Motorola 68000 processor. This fact brings WinUAE emulator to became extremely fast and, on modern X86 hardware clocked at hig speed (3GigaHertz and more), it becames capable to emulate old Classic Amigas at a speed more than original machines.
The emulator had suffered an enormous restyling than the initial versions. The aim is to replicate as close as possible all features of original classic Amigas, having in mind as primary target the Amiga 500. Actual maintainers cleaned the emulator from all known annoying bugs and improve many new features. This fact leads WinUAE to emulate Amiga almost perfectly from a technical point of view.
Notheworthy to mention is the fact that certain functions of the original Amigas, such as Copper and Bit Blitter activities of data calculation when performed along with playing music, and performing DMA data transfers together with disk or hard disk activity, as in certain games or demos, are sometimes capable to slow down even modern Intel CPUs clocked at high numbers. These slow-downs of processors reveal flaws and interruptions during the emulation, and demonstrate how modern was the concept of co-processors in early Amiga design and the incredible capabilities of original Amiga hardware, still not outperformed by actual machines which are uncapable to perform at once all these atcivities flawlessly.
Available at:
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