As you might have noticed, I am rather nostalgic for the Commodore Amiga series of computers.\u00c2\u00a0 They inspired me at an impressionable time in my life, the same way that steam trains did for my father…\u00c2\u00a0 Or Pok\u00c3\u00a9mon appears to be doing for my sons.<\/p>\n
The Amiga is a pretty unique collection of very tightly coupled hardware, with each component providing certain functionality but needing the other bits to make it work.\u00c2\u00a0 The trinity of Paula, Agnus and Denise provide IO, sound, graphics, manipulation and display, all with little or no CPU intervention thanks to the magic of DMA.\u00c2\u00a0 The highly interconnected nature, the multiple threads of execution, the sheer complexity of the hardware means emulating an Amiga to a high degree of accuracy is a difficult thing to do.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t be fooled by me stating that multiple threads means that stuff can be easily processed in parallel: simply put, it can’t, as the whole environment needs such a high degree of synchronisation that any advantages in a parallel approach are rapidly negated.<\/p>\n
A 68k Mac, or Atari ST, can be easily emulated thanks to the relative simplicity of the hardware.\u00c2\u00a0 Standard chips and little tailoring in such machines mean the emulation is simple to achieve and prove.\u00c2\u00a0 The Amiga’s custom chips lead to the power that made the machine attractive in the first place, but at the expense of simplicity.<\/p>\n
The State of the Art for Amiga emulation has, and I assume whilst Toni Wilen is alive, will be represented by WinUAE<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 This is a magnum opus that has consumed Toni for years and will continue to do so, and Toni himself is proud to be standing on the shoulders of giants.\u00c2\u00a0 The sheer completeness of emulation achieved is quite astonishing considering the complexity involved.\u00c2\u00a0 It works – dare I say it – perfectly.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, Toni is still developing this and at the time of writing he is working on version 2.4.1 beta<\/a> to address small inconsistencies and enhance usability.<\/p>\n All well and good, but what about Mac and Linux users?<\/p>\n Well, we’ve been running E-UAE<\/a>, from Richard Drummond, for years.\u00c2\u00a0 It works, and works well enough but has nowhere near the feature set of WinUAE.<\/p>\n PUAE<\/a>, from Mustafa Tufan (GnoStiC) has the ambition to be a portable version of WinUAE, based on modern WinUAE code.\u00c2\u00a0 Given the complexity of WinUAE, this is a hugely ambitious project, and Mustafa has achieved wonderful results.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m pleased to have helped in a very small way by providing precompiled OSX binaries<\/a>.<\/p>\n Most recently, Frode Solheim<\/a> has undertaken to develop a version of UAE based on a modern WinUAE with a focus on games, and suitability for media centre use with a suitable “10-foot interface” that will run on Windows, Linux and MacOS.\u00c2\u00a0 In a very short space of time Frode has achieved his goal, thanks in no small part to focus and relying on the work of others, and has released FS-UAE<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s few times that I’m genuinely speechless, however when I first ran FS-UAE I can safely say that I was.<\/p>\n FS-UAE now runs natively under MacOS, emulating both ECS and AGA Amigas, pretty much perfectly.\u00c2\u00a0 Using SwitchResX<\/a> I was able to create a 50Hz screenmode for my Macbook Pro, and FS-UAE runs with perfect PAL VSYNC.<\/p>\n