| From: | Don Cox |
| Date: | 2 Sep 2000 at 09:06:10 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga PPC UAE |
On 01-Sep-00, Alastair M. Robinson wrote:
>> Other programs may access Paula for sound while using RtG for
>> graphics.
>
> Yep - but emulating Paula's sample-replay isn't hard. The modulation
> stuff for AM/FM synthesis would be a lot more difficult - but does
> anyone know of software which actually used this capability? (Maybe
> PlaySID?)
You're missing the point. It's not that imitating the sound from Paula
is hard. (Although it's not as easy as you might think.)
The problem is that if the software is using Amiga hardware, every
single memory access in the emulation has to be checked to see if it is
actually a hardware read/write, so it can be escaped to an emulation
routine.
It's the checking that slows things down. The clever part of the
Transmeta technology is that they found a way to minimise these delays,
as explained in the Transmeta patents. This is not done in Amiga
emulators.
Whether it could be, I don't know.
Of course if the 68000 had separate addresses for hardware ports, like
the Z80, there would be no problem. Puttting hardware in the same address
range as RAM was a short-sighted decision. The Z80 has a specific set of
commands for hardware access, so they can be easily converted in an
emulation.
Why has nobody ever written an Atari ST emulation for the Amiga? Same
problem, I think.
Regards
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