Emulators better than the real thing?

[vic20owner]

I just stumbled across the filter settings for WinUAE.  Previously I was irritated with emulators never being able to go full screen well.  Now, with the filter settings (although not perfect) I am satisfied.

Then I considered that an emulator is more compatible than teh real thing... for example my A1200 may not run older ECS games, but my emulator will.

If I want to use native resolutions, I could use the picasso driver.

So I am starting to think that a laptop running winuae with a bunch of adfs is a lot better than a classic amiga with a box of dying floppies.

I've gone so far as to start configuring winuae on my mame cabinet

So how many of you guys think the emulator beats the real thing hands down?

[Jeckel]

Depends on what you wanna do.

Btw, the compatbility can not be considered. Even an "over-boosted" A4k can run almost all OCS/ECS/AGA using WHDLoad... using floppies is a little bit outdated.

Moreover on a real Amiga you will have the real perfect refresh rate, the real perfect sound and the real not so perfect controlers to play with :-D

[B00tDisk]

Right here.

I can, for example, play Quake in OS 3.1 under WinUAE on a moderately powerful PC and get framerates wholly unattainable on any amiga.

More practically, Lightwave on an emulated Amiga setup positively roars it renders so fast.

I was never what you could call an "amiga" games buff; I mean I liked playing games on the Amiga but not some of those old chestnuts that most other folks seem to love so (lemmings, turrican, swiv, shadow of the beast, killing game show, Alien Breed, etc. etc.); more into sims (Gunship2000, M1 Tank Platoon, F16 Combat Pilot, Thunderhawk and so on), all of which were typically straight PC ports anyway.  So going back and playing games isn't that big of a draw (to me).

The tiny bit of productivity apps that it's still fun to tinker with on the Amiga for me were real CPU hogs in their day and it's nice to run them through an emulator and watch, say, Vista 3.0 on the Amiga run at an absolutely blistering pace.

[maffoo]

IMHO the real thing is better for games, emulation never feels quite "right", I can't really explain why though. Maybe because I'm aware of Windows or OS X running in the background?

For processor intensive applications, however, an emulated Amiga on modern hardware is always going to be better.

Personally, I tend to use E-UAE to see if I like games before transferring them to my A4000 (with WHDLoad, no floppies needed!)

[mingle]

Hi,

I'd have to say "Yes, they are better" - and I'm talking about WinUAE here...

You can have every Amiga model (assuming you have the ROM images) emulated almost to perfection.

If you do run into compatibility issues, WinUAE is so tweakable you're pretty likely to be able to get 99% of things running.

I too have found that it's actually more compatible, since it's much more configurable than a 'real' Amiga. I sold my A1200 ages ago and now only run WinUAE.

It's great to be able to run a 1280x1024x24bit workbench faster than any Amiga ever could. And connecting to the internet via my PC's cable modem couldn't be simpler!

Along with Google Earth, WinUAE is one of the most amazing pieces of software for the PC. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to be able to 'boot-up' my old A1200 config and have it running much faster and better looking in 'software' than it ever did in 'hardware'!

Cheers,

Mike.

[hamtronix]

If they ever have any conventions it would be a great place to do a test. setup a couple of Emulators and a couple of real amigas (obviously with all signs as to which hidden) and see if anyone could tell. The emulators would have to be the same specs as the real As too.

[Tomas]

Then I considered that an emulator is more compatible than teh real thing... for example my A1200 may not run older ECS games, but my emulator will.

It would if you used a kickstart 1.x with the a1200. You can also run 99% of the games using a 1200 with the whdload software, which is much better than loading games from floppy anyways.. The drawback is that you need more than the standard 2meg chipram and that you need a hard drive. But if your a1200 has a hd+4meg ram added, then it will work perfectly with nearly all pre accelerator games.

UAE just does not cut it for gaming for me.. One of the things that annoyes me, is that it is plain impossible to get audio and video synced 100%. The audio is always delayed by so so many ms to stop it from getting choppy.
Also scrolling is nowhere near as perfect, as the background processes of the OS will interfere there.
Winuae is only better when you need pure cpu power.

[SamuraiCrow]

The AGA emulation speed still isn't as good as the ECS emulation on WinUAE.  Just try running Total Choas AGA on UAE with the Paula-based sound emulation and no patches installed.  Unless your processor is over 3GHz or has more than one core, it will lag noticiably when it's trying to play the music.

[Roj]

The last time I tried UAE, ARexx scripts, which worked on the real thing, would blow off with phony errors. Don't know if it's improved with newer versions or not yet, but it completely put me off emulation.

Does anyone know, has UAE's ARexx handling improved any over the last couple of years?

@VIC20owner:

BTW, I still use my VIC-20 a lot and even designed an ultimate expander for it...

Concerning the emulated Amiga, I would have disagreed with you until I stumbled upon a nice little utility called Rage 3D tweak.

I often used the real Amiga to create video titling effects and animations. A PC does not normally have a beautiful NTSC compatible signal. However, my Radeeon9800 does have an S-Video out.

Using Rage3D Tweak, I was able to obtain a custom 720x480 video out resolution that is perfectly D1/NTSC compliant, just like the Amiga.

Since then, I am almost exclusively using WinUAE in full screen mode. Everything is the same as the real thing including the taller pixels, except, of course, its a lot faster, more compatible and powerful than the real thing.

It is true however, that achieveing the emulation quality that I get required me to have a PC with a dual core CPU running at 2.8GHz and 1GB of RAM.

[cv643d]

I think it is a more rewarding experience to use a real Amiga computer but I have to agree running old apps on stereoids in WinUAE is nice.

With emulation you can never be sure you get the 100% exact experience. Some modules for example sounds weird in WinUAE, with a real Amiga you know you get the best possible Amiga-sound.

[Ilwrath]

Pretty much, what I still use the Amiga for is retro gaming.  And for that, I still take the real Amiga.  

As stated before, though, forget about the floppies except for the few games left that don't have WHDLoads.  

But I think the Amiga delivers a few things the emulations miss.

1) Sound/Video/Scroll sync.  On WinUAE, the timings aren't as good, and weird little scroll glitches still creep in.  Sound doesn't always properly sync.

2) Input lag.  I'm not sure if it's also related to (1) but joysticks seem slightly lagged to what the game is doing.  Possibly the video double-buffering?

3) Joysticks.  For all their faults, I prefer to play the games on the joysticks of the time.  I haven't found a  solution to use the 9-pin style sticks in a PC that doesn't introduce even more lag than using a PC stick. (Which is already lagged - See #2)  Also, nothing seems to emulate an Analog Amiga stick for the few games that support those.

4) Mouse - The Amiga had a few great games that were two player/two mouse.  I never did quite figure out how to do that on an emulation.

My 1200/030 stocked with a wide selection of WHDLoads isn't leaving my possession anytime too soon.  :-)

[mdwh2]

A nice bonus of emulation for games is that you can save the emulator state, which is handy for games that don't have a save option.

[krize]

Say what ?! You dont use floppys anymore on real Amigas either..

www.whdload.de - All games installed and fixed for your pimped Amiga.
Also you dont need to reset anymore, just quit back to workbench.

I have regged it many years ago, so should you!

[guru-666]

emulation better? hands down, no.  no way!  can you run the toaster? no.  UAE is cool but not as cool as a real amiga.