| From: | Alastair M. Robinson |
| Date: | 31 Aug 2000 at 18:50:30 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga PPC UAE |
Hi Don,
>> All of which brings us neatly full-circle - UAE may be great for
>> running old games, but an emulator which doesn't attempt to emulate
>> the chipset (A Draco emulator maybe? Or the AROS project once it's
>> more complete) would be well worth having for using legacy
>> applications.
> But how do you support legacy programs without emulating the chipset?
Bad choice of words on my part I think. As I understand it, UAE emulates
the Amiga chipset pretty much at the level of individual cycles - which is
why it can run games that don't work on an A1200.
For software which is written more robustly (software that doesn't care
whether ECS or AGA is present, for example), perhaps an emulator with
a less scrupulous, vaguely compatible chipset emulation (which would be
quickly over-ridden by virtual P96 drivers or something similar) would
allow greater emulation performance.
> The range of Amiga programs that work on the Draco is quite small.
Granted. It wouldn't be easy getting the OS to even boot without the
chipset. Without reasonable Paula emulation, the boot process would just
stall while looking for floppy drives!
> If all that was needed was to emulate the CPU, the job would be easy.
Agreed. It's a case of using the right tool for the job I suppose - for
picky programs, UAE is the answer; for less picky programs a different
approach would give better performance. Since this better approach doesn't
really exist yet, I guess it's academic ;-(
All the best,
I don't care who you are, Fatso. Just get those reindeer off my roof.
Quote carefully and read all ADMIN:README mails