Amiga in Your very cellphone

[DiskDoctor]

@ bloodline:

Yeah, maybe I am not an expert here, but not a newbie either.  Emulators is just another virtual layer on top of the system, that's all I need to now here.  I know some apps are of high voltage consumption.  What you say makes me think all mobile phones / palmtops are mostly made to rest, should any usage happens, they run out of batteries in several minutes.

If I do not know it, this is because I heavily used my all Palmtops, normal (J2ME) cell phones, stuff equipped with Symbian or windows mobile.  I never had such a problem some sustained action causes killing the battery.

But as I said, I am not familiar with mobile emulation (not too many people are there either).  It is simply hard to believe, If I did it and saw it before my very eyes, that would shock me and in turn convince. Fine, thanks for the advice I should not bother.

Alas, how can you explain this
1) three emulators (at least) were made already for mobile devices to imitate Amiga
2) someone must have been using this for real
3) there are many other mobile emulations, except for the Amiga.

Needn't to bother to reply this, all I wanted to point here is my rationale which makes me hard to justify and face the facts you're quoting. I had absolutely NO experience on mobile emulation but used any sorts of emulation on a PC or Mac.  Since those desktop systems are nowadays much better than those of smartphones (incomparable wouldn't be an answer anymore), what you say means both Symbian /WM systems are not as smart as they look (which I am aware of).

[Ilwrath]

Yeah, maybe I am not an expert here, but not a newbie either. Emulators is just another virtual layer on top of the system, that's all I need to now here. I know some apps are of high voltage consumption.

The lines between virtual machine and emulator are very blurred.  The important thing to remember about an emulator is this:  You are trying to make a program that is able to represent itself and behave as a piece of hardware.  In this case, the hardware in question would be an Amiga.  An Amiga runs at a fixed clock rate, uses complex timing interactions, and generally does all sorts of nasty and complex things with the custom chips all the time.  Emulating this is not easy, and not very scalable.  Even if the CPU is not under "load" processing something, the emulation still needs to synchronize and emulate everything.  A massive amount of power is used to emulate an Amiga that is sitting idle at an empty Workbench screen.

What you say makes me think all mobile phones / palmtops are mostly made to rest, should any usage happens, they run out of batteries in several minutes.

Pretty much spot-on.  They have a long standby mode, decent low-usage mode, and much shorter full-power mode.  My older iPaq can be used for days as a PDA, hours as an MP3 player, and barely more than an hour as a low-powered Amiga.  (If I use the overclock util that I suspect Bloodline uses, yeah, PocketUAE will kill it from 100% to <10% in around a half hour -- maybe less.)  

But as I said, I am not familiar with mobile emulation (not too many people are there either). It is simply hard to believe, If I did it and saw it before my very eyes, that would shock me and in turn convince. Fine, thanks for the advice I should not bother.

I don't think anyone is saying you shouldn't bother.  I'd love to have a newer version of PocketUAE to try.  Hey, maybe you'll find the golden optimization that makes it useful.  One never knows...

However, what we're trying to say is that it HAS been tried, and really, the results were far from optimal.  If you lived around the Detroit area, you'd more than welcome to borrow my iPaq for a couple days if you don't believe me.  :-(

And, the sad truth is, the Windows Mobile and Palm platforms are on their last legs, and haven't really added much since then.  

Alas, how can you explain this
1) three emulators (at least) were made already for mobile devices to imitate Amiga
2) someone must have been using this for real
3) there are many other mobile emulations, except for the Amiga.

1) It's cool bragging rights to run an emulator on your mobile device.  There's no getting over this.  Amiga is the coolest retro machine.  It's a natural fit for people to try.  Heck, you want to, right?
2) Sure.  I've used it.  But what do you mean "for real"?  Really, what good is a mobile, very simplistic, very slow Amiga that kills your batteries so quickly?  Bloodline says he managed to get A500 speed out of an iPaq 4150 and PocketUAE.  I have a model in that 4150 family, too...  My honest assessment of PocketUAE is about 2/3rd's A500 speed with very poor sound, and very poor keyboard support.  Not really the most useful thing ever.  (Though, cool as hell, no doubt.  I still have it installed!  It'll play Nuclear War decent, and I can complete a game before the battery dies.)
3) Other devices emulate easier.  VirtualTI (TI graphic calculator emulator) is superb.  I use it all the time.  Way more useful than any other calculator app I've encountered.  ClickGamer's excellent PocketCommodore is brilliant, too.  A full C64 emulation with good keyboard, sound, and joystick support.  Plus it doesn't need quite as much power to run, so the battery life during use isn't so bad.  THAT is useful.  

Heck, an Amiga emulator that could deliver that performance would be useful, too.  I just don't see the math working out for it, though.  Amiga is WAY more complex than a calculator or C64.  Complexity means needing more CPU cycles.  CPU cycles kill batteries.  There's no way around those facts.  :-(

[DiskDoctor]

@ bloodline:

Naah, I won't let go.

Check out this.

Why do people bother??  Why is this whole "mobile emulation" idea a topic, still?  I can conclude you're pretty much prejudiced against the whole idea.

I'm trying to get VS.NET to port the PocketUAE source, this will take time since I do not want to have my home bandwidth stuck for some three days.  As I was saying...  I must see it myself.  Also, you said batteries...  But there are some phones which key selling point is resistant batteries!  Rugged models for example.  Also, one can sometimes get a better battery than the one sold with the phone.  There's more, if one switches everything OFF (like in fly mode) and adjusts some screen features like brightness, also, uses headphones instead handsfree...  

I can still see a hope.  Maybe it's because I am a mobile geek as well.

EDIT*  There's one more crucial thing I must have missed somehow.  See WindowsMobile Smartphone is unlike you both guys have, iPAQs so palmtops are now classified as Classic :-).  Classic and Pro devices have a touch screen which consumes much, much more RAM memory and processor (since you wait for more independent events).  So maybe this is the way out...

[motorollin]

DiskDoctor wrote:
Emulators is just another virtual layer on top of the system

... which makes the machine work harder, hence consuming more power.

DiskDoctor wrote:
But as I said, I am not familiar with mobile emulation (not too many people are there either).  It is simply hard to believe, If I did it and saw it before my very eyes, that would shock me and in turn convince.

Do an experiment. Fully charge a laptop and run a word processor on it. Type on it until the battery runs out, and write down how long the battery lasted. Then charge it up again and play games on UAE until the battery runs out. I guarantee 100% that the battery will last longer during word processing than it does when running UAE.

The principle is exactly the same for a mobile phone running UAE.

DiskDoctor wrote:
1) three emulators (at least) were made already for mobile devices to imitate Amiga

Not particularly difficult to explain. They just destroy battery life. For example, UAE on my GP2X drains the battery more quickly than running a native game.

DiskDoctor wrote:
2) someone must have been using this for real

Yes. But not on an iPhone, because Apple won't allow it.

DiskDoctor wrote:
3) there are many other mobile emulations, except for the Amiga.

Same answer as for 1...

--
moto

[DiskDoctor]

Yet another story.

I just found Snes9x UIQ and vSun SNES emulators for Symbian UIQ and s60 respectively.
(hope those links will work)

What do people pay for?  Frustration??
And the latter one is said to work on Nokia 6600... How's that?

I know SNES is not Amiga but... pretty close in terms of functionality, isn't it?

[DiskDoctor]

I just saw today a working version of PocketUAE on some HTC Windows Mobile 6 Pro device.  So it means that it still works.

I wish I had a Professional Windows device to test it on, instead, I'm still thinking of changing the app so that it needs no touchscreen.  It looks as a matter of simple UI handling mapping/change - won't take long as having .NET framework installed.

Eventually a working Smartphone version might be considered as a gadget, but hey - it won't drain my energy to do something for OS4.

[persia]

The mouse should be replaced by the touchscreen and the joystick by the accelerometer.  

I'm re-evaluating Windows Mobile, I discovered XDA-Developers and PPCWarez and between the two I've load a far more responsive ROM and lots of programs.  Windows Mobile is crap, the devices it runs on have definite possibilities, the key is to get rid of as much Microsoft crap as possible, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, etc just take up space on precious internal memory.

It's really no different than a PC, even Vista is usable if you take to it with the digital equivalent of a pick axe...

[Hammer]

persia wrote:
The mouse should be replaced by the touchscreen and the joystick by the accelerometer.  

I'm re-evaluating Windows Mobile, I discovered XDA-Developers and PPCWarez and between the two I've load a far more responsive ROM and lots of programs.  Windows Mobile is crap, the devices it runs on have definite possibilities, the key is to get rid of as much Microsoft crap as possible, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, etc just take up space on precious internal memory.

It's really no different than a PC, even Vista is usable if you take to it with the digital equivalent of a pick axe...

Samsung Omnia includes 8 or 16 GB integrated flash and can be expanded for another 8 or 16 GB from micro-SD.

[persia]

Yep, the Kaiser has a 16GB card in it, but it's different, it shows up as /Storage Card and is different from internal memory, Opera needs to be in internal memory, much of the TouchFlo #D stuff needs to be in internal memory, Bill knows why, I haven't a clue.  Anyway, I may do away with Opera, since the Iris browser is just about usable (it's WebKit (from Apple) based) and has no problem running from /Storage Card.

[Daedalus]

DiskDoctor wrote:

I know SNES is not Amiga but... pretty close in terms of functionality, isn't it?

Well, not really. A SNES doesn't have multitasking for example, and due to the simpler hardware and timing involved wouldn't be as CPU intensive to emulate as a full Amiga system. The thing is, a virtual layer like Java doesn't require 100% of the CPU time - it only needs what it needs, so if the Java app is idle, it doesn't take too much CPU power. Emulating an Amiga is totally different, and isn't that style of virtual machine layer at all. A huge amount goes on behind the scenes in an Amiga, both in hardware (custom chips, CIAs, device access) and software (background tasks, filesystems, task messaging, events), and that will happily eat 100% of your CPU time on any current mobile device. Hell, it's only in the last few years that PCs have become powerful enough to emulate a higher up Amiga satisfactorily.

[mdwh2]

bloodline wrote:
A few years ago only geeks had Mobile devices... Geeks are prepared to mess around with Emulators... Now the common person has mobile devices... common People don't want emulators, don't care about some old game they never played before, that  they won't have.. You can't sell Amiga games or Amiga ROMs...

The market for UAE on mobile devices is smaller now than it was years ago.

Although I'm not sure how "more people have mobile devices" means that there are now less "geeks" around...?

Amiga software is not meant to be used in a mobile environment and really needs reworking to get the best out of it

Indeed this is a problem, but there are phones out there with keyboards, the question is how to map joystick and mouse to those (could it be done with touchscreen?) I don't think it's an impossible problem to overcome.

Oh... no idea... if you had the original source and data files... it probably wouldn't take more than a month to port an Amiga game to the iPhone... a bit longer to beta test it... Most amiga Games were not that complex...

They were also mostly written in assembler, which makes porting a lot harder. And more than a month per game is still expensive, compared to the time spent porting an emulator (which is written in portable C), which can then run most games.

(Note that the source to some games has been released, but when it's in assembler, I've yet to see ports - e.g., I'd love to see a port of Alien Breed 3D 2, but despite the source code being released years ago, has anyone managed to port it? Unfortunately it was written entirely in assembler...)

That's not to say there's anything wrong with porting or remaking games of course, as a programmer I've attempted the latter myself. But I can see advantages to the emulator route.

The world has moved on... Just as the Amiga moved people on from the days of the Sinclair Spectrum and C64... and the new games which that allowed... Modern platforms will move us on again!

The world has moved on

Well, you're reading a forum entitled "Amiga emulation", I'm not surprised that people here are going to have an interest in emulation

Now having said all this, I don't think that Amiga emulation would have any effect for an "Amiga" platform (whatever that might be), and I'm not sure I follow whatever commercial plan DiskDoctor is suggesting (I think it's far better done just as a port of UAE). Although I can see that DiskDoctor makes an interesting point: currently on mobile platforms, people seem to pay money for all kinds of simple games, or even crappy ringtones.

motorollin wrote:

DiskDoctor wrote:
2) someone must have been using this for real

Yes. But not on an iPhone, because Apple won't allow it.

That's the Iphone for you. There are plenty of other phones.

A lot of this "It can't be done!" talk reminds me of similar talk for PCs around 10 or more years ago - that even though other platforms could be emulated, there was something special about the Amiga that made it unemulateable. Of course, it was only a matter of years before not only could it be done, but soon WinUAE was running rings around even the fastest Amiga. And whilst a few people still cling to the idea that "But a real Amiga still feels better, an emulator can't reproduce that!", mostly it is seen as a bit laughable to claim that a PC is unable to do Amiga emulation, and the idea that it was ever considered impossible is seen as laughable.

Mobile platforms are still relatively primitive, but CPUs still continue to increase exponentially in performance.

Daedalus wrote:
Hell, it's only in the last few years that PCs have become powerful enough to emulate a higher up Amiga satisfactorily.

Note that it's been 9 years since an emulating PC has outperformed even the fastest 68060 Amiga, let alone an A500 that's sufficient for most games ( http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/browse_frm/thread/662e0ab899bfc1cb?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8 ), though I don't know how chipset issues compared to that.

[mdwh2]

I'm curious about the CPU/power issue. I can quite believe that something like UAE would kill the battery quick on phones, but how do intensive real time games manage to use so much less?

Remember that UAE only uses 100% CPU if you set the option to allow it to use as much as possible. If I select the "Match A500 speed" option, then even with Sound set to 100% accurate, when running a game on WinUAE I get about 5% CPU usage (i.e., 10% of a single core).

OTOH, when running native real time games on Windows, the CPU is often maxed out at 50% (i.e., using all of one core). If mobile games are managing to use less power compared with UAE when the "Match A500 speed" option is set (were the tests done with this option?), then there must be more to the story - perhaps particular efficiency in games written for mobiles, or it's not simply about CPU usage?

Whatever the answer is, any port/remake of a game on a mobile platform would have to take this into account - otherwise the chances are that any such port/remake of a game, even though it's no longer emulated, would still hog the battery just as much.

[persia]

@DiskDoctor

It's 2009, nothing we do here is of any relevance to the current year, we're not here because of relevance.  I for one think it would be neat to have an Amiga emulator on a mobile.  It would be fun, that's enough.

[bloodline]

mdwh2 wrote:

bloodline wrote:
A few years ago only geeks had Mobile devices... Geeks are prepared to mess around with Emulators... Now the common person has mobile devices... common People don't want emulators, don't care about some old game they never played before, that  they won't have.. You can't sell Amiga games or Amiga ROMs...

The market for UAE on mobile devices is smaller now than it was years ago.

Although I'm not sure how "more people have mobile devices" means that there are now less "geeks" around...?

The geeks have moved on... devices are now aims at the consumer...

Amiga software is not meant to be used in a mobile environment and really needs reworking to get the best out of it

Indeed this is a problem, but there are phones out there with keyboards, the question is how to map joystick and mouse to those (could it be done with touchscreen?) I don't think it's an impossible problem to overcome.

It isn't impossible, but the Amiga had two user input ports that could accept a range of input devices... commonly a mouse and a joystick... the Emulator has no idea what the software expects to be plugged in... thus you need to implement complex menu offering the user various options and emulations of different devices... it is now getting complex and tedious for any user and don't forget the small screen space... This is not going to become mainstream.

Oh... no idea... if you had the original source and data files... it probably wouldn't take more than a month to port an Amiga game to the iPhone... a bit longer to beta test it... Most amiga Games were not that complex...

They were also mostly written in assembler, which makes porting a lot harder. And more than a month per game is still expensive, compared to the time spent porting an emulator (which is written in portable C), which can then run most games.

(Note that the source to some games has been released, but when it's in assembler, I've yet to see ports - e.g., I'd love to see a port of Alien Breed 3D 2, but despite the source code being released years ago, has anyone managed to port it? Unfortunately it was written entirely in assembler...)

That's not to say there's anything wrong with porting or remaking games of course, as a programmer I've attempted the latter myself. But I can see advantages to the emulator route.

Even the effort to port the ASM source to c/c++/Objective-C would be more worth it than the disadvantages of the Emulator.

The world has moved on... Just as the Amiga moved people on from the days of the Sinclair Spectrum and C64... and the new games which that allowed... Modern platforms will move us on again!

The world has moved on

Well, you're reading a forum entitled "Amiga emulation", I'm not surprised that people here are going to have an interest in emulation

I think Emulation is a fascinating topic, and is now by far the most important aspect of the Amiga experience... BUT, that is not what DiskDoctor is talking about. see below.

Now having said all this, I don't think that Amiga emulation would have any effect for an "Amiga" platform (whatever that might be), and I'm not sure I follow whatever commercial plan DiskDoctor is suggesting (I think it's far better done just as a port of UAE). Although I can see that DiskDoctor makes an interesting point: currently on mobile platforms, people seem to pay money for all kinds of simple games, or even crappy ringtones.

DiskDoctor is suggesting that an Amiga Emulator on mobile platforms is a commercial idea... it isn't;

1. An Amiga Emulator will (and does) kill a battery dead in minutes.
2. The input method of Amiga software is not suited to the mobile platform.
3. The Software is not easily available, both the OS and the games... much of which is in legal limbo...
4. Software is difficult to get from it's original medium (Amiga Floppy) to the mobile device.
5. Most of the mobile game buying market has never heard of an "Armoooger"...

motorollin wrote:

DiskDoctor wrote:
2) someone must have been using this for real

Yes. But not on an iPhone, because Apple won't allow it.

That's the Iphone for you. There are plenty of other phones.

A lot of this "It can't be done!" talk reminds me of similar talk for PCs around 10 or more years ago - that even though other platforms could be emulated, there was something special about the Amiga that made it unemulateable.

it was impossible with the level of technology 15 years ago (there is just so much going on inside the Amiga, and it all has to happen at precise times)... by 10 years ago... 1999, I ran DOSUAE on a P233... and it was amazing... better than a real Amiga... it has only got better since.

Of course, it was only a matter of years before not only could it be done, but soon WinUAE was running rings around even the fastest Amiga. And whilst a few people still cling to the idea that "But a real Amiga still feels better, an emulator can't reproduce that!", mostly it is seen as a bit laughable to claim that a PC is unable to do Amiga emulation, and the idea that it was ever considered impossible is seen as laughable.

Mobile platforms are still relatively primitive, but CPUs still continue to increase exponentially in performance.

Mobile platforms have the performance already... but batteries don't... the usefulness of a mobile platform is governed by battery life.

Daedalus wrote:
Hell, it's only in the last few years that PCs have become powerful enough to emulate a higher up Amiga satisfactorily.

Note that it's been 9 years since an emulating PC has outperformed even the fastest 68060 Amiga, let alone an A500 that's sufficient for most games ( http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/browse_frm/thread/662e0ab899bfc1cb?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8 ), though I don't know how chipset issues compared to that.

[bloodline]

mdwh2 wrote:
I'm curious about the CPU/power issue. I can quite believe that something like UAE would kill the battery quick on phones, but how do intensive real time games manage to use so much less?

The mobile games use the interfaces provided by the mobile device vendor to ensure minimum battery usage.

Remember that UAE only uses 100% CPU if you set the option to allow it to use as much as possible. If I select the "Match A500 speed" option, then even with Sound set to 100% accurate, when running a game on WinUAE I get about 5% CPU usage (i.e., 10% of a single core).

The ARM in a mobile device is a simple CPU, generally in-order single issue. The CPU on your desktop is able to push probably 8 instructions through in a single cycle, per core!!!

OTOH, when running native real time games on Windows, the CPU is often maxed out at 50% (i.e., using all of one core). If mobile games are managing to use less power compared with UAE when the "Match A500 speed" option is set (were the tests done with this option?), then there must be more to the story - perhaps particular efficiency in games written for mobiles, or it's not simply about CPU usage?

The desktop and the mobile platforms are different beasts... you can't compare apples and oranges.

Whatever the answer is, any port/remake of a game on a mobile platform would have to take this into account - otherwise the chances are that any such port/remake of a game, even though it's no longer emulated, would still hog the battery just as much.

No... think about it for one second... a native game just has to call the mobile platform's blit() function to draw an image to the screen... in the emulator the same game will have not call the native blit() function but all the mechanisms that the Amiga used to draw the image on the screen... and still maintain timing... thus requires something like 100 times the amount of work!!!

Do you know how Emulators work?

[bloodline]

persia wrote:
@DiskDoctor

It's 2009, nothing we do here is of any relevance to the current year, we're not here because of relevance.  I for one think it would be neat to have an Amiga emulator on a mobile.  It would be fun, that's enough.

I second that!

The point I am arguing against is potential for any commercial success from any such venture.

I'd obviously love UAE on my iPhone... but I wouldn't really be able to use it away from a power source, and I would prefer to have the games I use native to the iPhone itself.