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Offline StormLord

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #14 on: January 19, 2009, 11:27:56 AM »
I had configured UAE and winUAE on many machines from day one till now.
its a surprising experience to see how a heavily upgraded amiga works.
But emulation is always emulation, especially when trying to emulate DMA and synced chipsets on non DMA-asynchronous buffered chips. the sound latency is there, and even thought its hardly noticeable on games with appropriate config file, its still there..
try protracker or octamed and you will have a nerve breakdown!
From the other side you have a fast amiga with graphics and even sound card to play with.
JIT really make all things fly, but again, in some tasks, UAE is 20x faster and in some others is 10x slower, and that difference don't allow you to really feel as you are using a real amiga.
Ofcourse with proper configuration you can minimize that, but it never become perfect.  
 

Offline bloodline

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #15 on: January 19, 2009, 11:39:17 AM »
@StormLord

Well I use E-UAE on my Macbook Pro to run OctaMED... While E-UAE is not even close to the level of WinUAE, I do get Audio latency below 8ms, which as a professional musician is better than the minimum required for studio work... Where anything over 14ms is unusable...

So I stand by my statment that emulation is almost perfect. As pointed out, what we don't have anymore is low quality Display (TV) and Audio devices which cover up the flaws in the Amiga's outputs...  

Offline darksun9210

Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #16 on: January 19, 2009, 01:11:58 PM »
winUAE has been more than usefull on many occasions, from dumping a "known good" amiga install from an HD file to a compact flash cards attached via USB-IDE then IDE-CF adapters to creating backups, and setting up a fileserver with samba shares dishing out to any real amiga that can get to it. (much faster and more stable than a samba share off of a real amiga).

i won't be running out of VGA capable displays for a while. half the place i work for is currently going through administration, and there is the chance a stack load of NEC 1570nx monitors comming up for grabs. even pretty closely colour matched to "amiga white". perfect for an indivision attatched 1200 :-)
an indivision 500 and 4000 would be cool too :-D

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Offline hooligan

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #17 on: January 19, 2009, 01:26:17 PM »
Quote
My problem is EVERY time I managed to set up the proper configurations, e.g. games (it's all about games) were playable but the music was getting stalled every time on rapid pseudo processor's usage.


This sounds like you have not set speed to "MATCH A500 SPEED".
 

Offline AmigaHeretic

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #18 on: January 19, 2009, 04:44:46 PM »
Quote

bloodline wrote:
@StormLord

...what we don't have anymore is low quality Display (TV) and Audio devices which cover up the flaws in the Amiga's outputs...  


Have to agree there.  I think when people see an old Amiga game at 320x200 on a 21.3" monitor, there like, WoW those are some big pixels! :-)


I use WinUAE and it's emulation is great.  The only thing that I never could get to work before was one of the NewTek demos where it shows "4096 color Hi-Res" (on OCS) and it has the picture of the guys face closed up, well, the latest version of WinUAE show it perfectly now.  So I guess it's WinUAE IS perfect now.

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Offline DiskDoctorTopic starter

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #19 on: January 19, 2009, 05:06:57 PM »
Well, listening to this testimonies makes me feel convinced, at least about WinUAE.  For most people sound is not the issue (if there is an issue) so I can blame myself having, again, bad luck.

Actually I did try ALL the provided config files (i.e. from back2roots site), tried each on several games, also I manipulated with some options but... still got my ear aching.

So OK if we consider WinUAE as finest solution on Windows, can anybody claim that made some emulator work as fine on OS X for a change? I tried E-UAE, same story.

And I am really not a lamer computer user..

BTW talking about some emulation, I assume AmiKit and AmigaForever environments claim to perform better?  Or am I just talking nonsense?
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Offline DiskDoctorTopic starter

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #20 on: January 19, 2009, 05:21:18 PM »
Quote
Quote
Quote:

    The problem with emulating a computer is that there will always be latency. Usually this is most visible in sound.


I don't think so. Even if there was any latency I doubt any human can notice it.


Maybe I wasn't precise.

The problem with the sound is actually that it rraaapdly loops for a while, then gets back to its pace and time frame.  I called it latency, I should have said echoing rather than that.

Sorry for this confusion.
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Offline AmiKit

Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #21 on: January 19, 2009, 05:24:25 PM »
Quote
BTW talking about some emulation, I assume AmiKit and AmigaForever environments claim to perform better? Or am I just talking nonsense?

Actually both AmiKit and Amiga Forever use WinUAE as its own emulation engine. More info here: http://amikit.amiga.sk/faq.htm

Offline bloodline

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #22 on: January 19, 2009, 05:27:00 PM »
Quote

DiskDoctor wrote:
Quote
Quote
Quote:

    The problem with emulating a computer is that there will always be latency. Usually this is most visible in sound.


I don't think so. Even if there was any latency I doubt any human can notice it.


Maybe I wasn't precise.

The problem with the sound is actually that it rraaapdly loops for a while, then gets back to its pace and time frame.  I called it latency, I should have said echoing rather than that.

Sorry for this confusion.



Oh very odd! I suggest that you increase the priority of the Emulator, that sounds like the audio buffer isn't being filled in time.

Offline AmigaHeretic

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #23 on: January 19, 2009, 05:37:22 PM »
Quote

DiskDoctor wrote:
BTW talking about some emulation, I assume AmiKit and AmigaForever environments claim to perform better?  Or am I just talking nonsense?


No I don't think they claim better performance or anything.

Basically, AmigaForever is the same WinUAE we download.  But it includes all the Kickstart ROMs, 1.0 to 3.1 (maybe 3.5 - 3.9) as well as all the disks for pretty much all the OSes.  So Workbench 1.0 disk to a full set of Workbench 3.1 disks. (ADF format of course).  It also comes with tons of games and it installs a "launcher" to choose from a huge list of games which in turn launches WinUAE with a specific config.


Now, AmiKit, you could think of like an image of someones Amiga Harddrive that has tons and tons of programs.  You still need your own legal copy of Amiga Workbench and rom images (which the installer automatically adds to the HD image)  It still just WinUAE, but your HD is now setup with 24bit drivers, AHI, and 1000s or programs.  Makes it real easy to get into a high end Amiga setup.  Great for people coming back to the Amiga and seeing how far we've come.

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Offline DiskDoctorTopic starter

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #24 on: January 19, 2009, 05:49:42 PM »
Quote

AmiKit wrote:
Actually both AmiKit and Amiga Forever uses WinUAE as its own emulation engine.


Sorry for me being so dull; actually it is because I'm trying to catch up with the news, started recently.

But also as I skimmed the AmiKit and AmigaForever www pages, my first impression was not "emulator with some feature pack"; I concluded it must be something else, yet similar...
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Offline KThunder

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #25 on: January 19, 2009, 08:09:26 PM »
if you have any problems setting winuae up on your own from a download, get amigaforever. it is an awesome package that takes 99% of the guesswork out of running an emulated amiga.

there are two sources of latency that you may notice but only if you are doing some pretty intense stuff with your emulated rig.

the first is frame rate. the amigas (and uaes ) chipsets are locked to the video frame. and there some things that break or dont work correctly if the frame rate is changed. for example with lower video modes you cant set your audio rate to 41khz because paula is locked to the video rate. it is limited to like 22khz or so, but if you change to 640 ntsc or 512pal modes you can set your audio higher.

where this becomes a problem is with the pcs video. your video card is probably scanning at somewhere between 70 and 120hz where the emulated amiga is locked to 30. 30 goes evenly into 120, but not 70, or 75 85 or many of the other refresh rates svga modes use.

that makes smooth scrolling amiga games look jumpy even if the pc is 1000times faster than an amiga simply because the frame rates arent divisable.
change your pcs video refresh to one divisible by the miggies frame rate and it will look much better.

the second latency problem is audio latency and also isnt winuaes fault. a midi stream has a long way to go between a midi (or other device) and the emulated amiga. there are decent sound cards out right now that are close to the 13ms latency mentioned, because of poorly written drivers etc. throw an emulation monkey wrench into the works and you wont even be close. many pc sequncing etc. software can test latency and time for it. as far as i know there is no way to do this with emulated amiga programs.

i used to use winuae for desktop stuff and dosfellow for games with very decent speed on a 333mhz k6-2 computer. it is very doable on any of todays computers

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Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #26 on: January 19, 2009, 08:21:23 PM »
Sometimes I've found that the audio drivers for UAE sometimes loop unnecessarily but if you run through the more processor consuming hardware sound emulation (in particular, not using AHI as an audio.device substitute), it should be better.

I run EUAE on my Intel Mac Mini and the HiToro GUI frontend.  They work well together.  Also, I've discovered that the AHI audio driver works as well under EUAE as WinUAE even though that isn't documented.
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #27 on: January 20, 2009, 06:02:00 AM »
>by DiskDoctor on 2009/1/18 9:57:56


>Hello,

...
>Also, some time ago I encountered some post on some other forum stating that "no one has ever managed to re-create the original chipset as a Virtual Machine because it was SO PERFECT it is hardly possible if ever."

If you go by PC standard hardware, it is impossible to do the cycle-exact emulation of the Amiga.  Now if you have some specialized PC hardware like a multi-channel audio card, sprite-based video card, digital joystick interface, PC w/HPET timers, etc. that are all superset of the hardware of your Amiga in every respect and have software that uses these directly (not through an API or buffered scheme), then it is possible.  

>My problem is EVERY time I managed to set up the proper configurations, e.g. games (it's all about games) were playable but the music was getting stalled every time on rapid pseudo processor's usage.

>Classic Amiga music is crucial to me, something one might not accept unfidel.

From what I have read, emulators rely on buffering and do not do cycle-exact one-to-one mapping of the hardware; i.e, if I change the volume register of the Amiga dynamically at some set frequency based on Copper or IRQ, you can bet there will be latency or distortions in the emulation (without even trying it).

>Or maybe it is my fault because of not optimizing configuration set-up properly?

For some things, it does not matter how much you play with the configuration, it just won't work.  For example, if you were relying heavily on joystick port for input or output via CIA chip ($BFE001/$BFD000) or $DFF00A/$DFF00C/$DFF036 to cause "fill-ins" for your music manually or controlled by another device, you can bet that using the PC Gameport or even USB version of joystick will give you inferior performance.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #28 on: January 20, 2009, 06:14:11 AM »
>by persia on 2009/1/18 10:38:43

>The various versions of UAE are almost technically perfect. That's what some complain about, 80's computer was clunky and a bit unstable, running an Amiga has always been a bit like building your own ultra lite aircraft, you were exposed to the environment and never knew when you would experience a crash...

Believe it or not, Amiga computers are stable-- it's the software on any machine that makes the computer look unstable.  Early Windows were also crashing all the time; but now with memory protection, the crash is localized to the application running.  I have plenty of software on Amiga that never crashes.

>Real Amigas are always on the edge of disaster, with cobbled together parts that were never meant to work together. They click, they pop, they wheeze. Experiencing an Amiga through the clean safety of a modern OS is somehow almost cheating.

If the emulator is cycle-exact, it should crash the emulated software just like the real amiga.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: Amiga emulators: is it worth it?
« Reply #29 from previous page: January 20, 2009, 06:30:27 AM »
>by AmiKit on 2009/1/19 5:13:35

>Quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>>The problem with emulating a computer is that there will always be latency. Usually this is most visible in sound.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>I don't think so. Even if there was any latency I doubt any human can notice it.

There IS latency since they purposely introduced it in their buffering scheme so they get more time to translate from one machine to another.  You will notice it -- it depends on the application and which hardware resources it uses.

Quote:
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>>You'll never get the complete Amiga look and feel via emulation, no matter how good UAE is.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>Well, a simple Turing test denies your statement. http://www.amigaforever.com/tutorials/goodorbad/

That article is subjective (understandably) and flawed.  You can also put a person who mostly does BASIC language programming in front of an Atari ST set up like an Amiga but that does not make an Atari ST an Amiga.  There's no way to try all the possible applications that can be written for a machine.  CPU power increasing over many years does not make all the other hardware automatically better.  And if the emulation was 100% accurate on PC, there's no reason to use the emulation-- just get the PC version of the software which avoids the translation layer completely and get a more efficient result.  It's easy enough to write a program that works on all OCS amigas but not on an emulator given the standard PC hardware.

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