Amiga emulator

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amiga emulators are programs that allow, 68k - Amiga to use software (modern) on other computer systems. They mostly emulate a complete classic Amiga of the generations with a 68k processor including main processor , controller , graphics and sound support.

Popular Amiga emulators

UAE

Course of development

UAE
↳ WinUAE
↳ E-UAE
↳ PUAE
↳ PNaCl PUAE
↳ FS-UAE
↳ SAE
↳ UAE4All

UAE (Abbreviation for Unix Amiga Emulator or Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator , formerly also self- deprecatingly Unusable Amiga Emulator ) is a complete software emulator for all models of the "classic" Amiga series offered by Commodore International ( A500 / A2000 / A1200 / A4000 / etc .), offers hard drive emulation and supports OCS , ECS and AGA .

UAE has been ported to various platforms, e.g. B. FreeBSD , macOS , iOS , Linux , Android , Blackberry , PlayStation Portable , Xbox , Wii , Dreamcast / Dingoo , BeOS / ZETA / Haiku , MS-DOS , Mac OS Classic , RISC OS but also for MorphOS , AROS and the AmigaOS itself, for example to emulate an Amiga 500 on an AmigaOne or Pegasos .

A special variant called WinUAE was developed for Windows based on UAE . WinUAE is the most actively developed version of UAE. Again based on this, E-UAE was created to make the special functions of WinUAE usable on other operating systems. Since E-UAE was not further developed, the PUAE fork was created to accommodate the current developments of WinUAE on Unix-like platforms such as B. Linux and Mac OS X to make available.

The Fork FS-UAE , initiated by Frode Solheim, is primarily geared towards players . In addition to a further development of the UAE, this includes a separate launcher and an arcade mode. The launcher enables a clear management of game-specific configurations including connection to the database of openretro.org and the download of games. The arcade mode is geared towards users who want to use the emulator with a gamepad on the television and represents a correspondingly prepared user interface. Another special feature is the implementation of a platform-neutral netplay function. The FS-UAE Launcher can meanwhile also be used to start emulators of systems other than the Amiga.

On September 1st, 2012 Scripted AMIGA Emulator (SAE) , which was implemented by Rupert Hausberger using JavaScript , was published. It is based on WinUAE and requires a browser that supports HTML5 and a very powerful computer.

The solution, which Christian Stefansen implemented especially for Google Chrome using the Portable Native Client (PNaCl) technology, follows a similar approach . Here a special PUAE is executed in the browser by first translating the emulator in platform-independent bytecode on the web server into machine code by the PNaCl.

fellow

Figure 1, How Fellow and UAE work

Fellow is a software emulator of the Amiga 500 with some features of other models (e.g. ECS blits, 68010, 68020 and 68030 CPUs) and hard disk emulation. The emulator is written in Watcom C ++ ( DOS ) and ported to Windows (WinFellow), Linux (XFellow) and Mac OS (MacFellow). Most of the functions of the original Amiga machine are emulated. Compared to UAE, Fellow is quite fast and can therefore be used on systems with low processor performance such as the 486 . The emulator was brought to life by the Norwegian programmer Petter Schau. The last official version for DOS (The Fellow Project 0.3.6R1) was published by Torsten Giebl and Dominik Schmidt and contains some speed hacks and an integrated cheater module. For porting to Windows (WinFellow) some parts of the fast assembler routines have been translated into C. The further development of WinFellow had been discontinued in 2005, but was revived in 2010 with a new compatibility release for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The development of XFellow has been stopped since 2003.

Amithlon

Figure 2, How Amithlon works

Amithlon is a commercial virtual machine that emulates a number of Amiga computers. Amithlon contains an integrated JIT compiler , is based on a Linux kernel and accesses special x86 drivers that bypass the 68k emulation. Thus, graphics cards , SCSI - and ATAPI hard drives are addressed directly under AmigaOS 3.x, which is a significant increase in speed brings. The software owes its name to a fusion of the words Amiga and Athlon . The package boots like an independent operating system and allows you to turn an Intel / AMD-equipped standard PC into an almost full-fledged Amiga.

The further development was discontinued by Bernd Meyer after a dispute over the rights between developer Bernd Meyer and Vertrieb Haage & Partner. The follow-up project "Umilator" was also no longer implemented.

Reading from floppy disks

Since PC drives cannot read Amiga format disks with a standard floppy controller without very special tricks (hardware modification, connecting two drives ), container files called Amiga Disk Files (ADF) are mostly used, which contain an image of the Amiga -Disks included. These can e.g. B. via a null modem cable, network or CD-ROM from the Amiga to the PC.

The Amiga format uses the MFM coding just like the PC , but basically writes the data blocks of a track all at once, one after the other without gaps, in order to increase the capacity of a DD disk from 720 kB to 880 kB. This is not supported by the floppy disk controllers used in PCs.

Legal

For operating an Amiga emulation is basically Image of a Kickstart - ROM necessary, which is the basic system of the Amiga operating system, which is protected by copyright and must be purchased. Anyone who owns a real Amiga already has a Kickstart ROM and can extract it into a file using the appropriate software and transfer it to another computer and use it. Alternatively, emulator distributions such as Amiga Forever and Amiga Classix can be bought in stores, which include these ROMs and often also the AmigaOS (Workbench). It is now also possible (with restrictions) to use a Kickstart ROM from the free AROS operating system instead.

literature

  • Hansjürg Wüthrich: Emulators . How computer systems and game consoles become immortal. Scriptorium-Verlag, Morschen 2007, ISBN 978-3-938199-08-4 .

Web links

UAE, WinUAE, PUAE / E-UAE, FS-UAE and SAE

  • winuae.de German information about WinUAE
  • webwood.de Official website of WinUAE (German mirror)
  • rcdrummond.net Official website of E-UAE, a UAE further development based on WinUAE

fellow

Emulator distributions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amiga Emulator for Android forum.xda-developers.com, accessed April 16, 2011
  2. ↑ UAE Amiga Emulator - Blackberry Port tbotz.blogspot.de, accessed December 24, 2013
  3. ↑ UAE Amiga emulator for PSP kaillera.com, accessed December 23, 2013
  4. ↑ UAE-X Amiga emulator for X-Box uaex.sourceforge.net, accessed December 23, 2013
  5. ↑ Open Source Amiga500 emulator for Dreamcast and Dingoo console chui.dcemu.co.uk, accessed December 24, 2013
  6. ↑ github.com
  7. ↑ scriptedamigaemulator.net Scripted AMIGA emulator
  8. ↑ Scripted AMIGA Emulator in JavaScript scriptedamigaemulator.net
  9. ↑ Amiga emulator in the Chrome browser . heise.de, accessed December 23, 2013
  10. ↑ Amiga 500 Emulator - A Portable Native Client demo. appspot.com, accessed December 23, 2013