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.
Attempts have also been made to create a hardware Amiga emulator on FPGA chips (Minimig).[1]
One of the most challenging aspects of emulating the Amiga architecture is the custom chipset, which is extremely complex (even though today's graphics processors and digital signal processors outperform it easily) and relies on critical cycle-exact emulation, particularly for some game titles. As a result, early emulators did not always achieve the intended results though later emulator versions can now accurately reproduce the behavior of Amiga systems.
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At the time of writing there exists no emulator capable of emulating an Amiga with PowerPC accelerator or PowerPC AmigaOS (AmigaOS 4, MorphOS)
An actively developed emulator capable of emulating all the common Amiga configurations. (A500, A600, etc...)
Although the name varies, this emulator exists for Windows, Macintosh, RISC OS, Linux, Unix and other systems, including the Amiga itself. It is capable of emulating an 68K Amiga, including undocumented behavior, with OCS and/or AGA chipsets and modern graphics and audio subsystems, including Picasso96 graphic libraries and Amiga AHI 16 bit audio subsystem.