real amiga vs winuae

[danybebe]

Hi all.

I want to assemble a working amiga that is actually usable, and is not too
difficult to use (I want my kids to be able to load games too), but  I've
never actually owned or used an amiga in the past until now (but ZX Spectrum, c64s and 128), so I'll have to learn how to use it well (I don't think is too difficult).

- I own an Amiga 1000 and an Amiga 3000, they both work fine (I
personally tested them, I can boot workbench and some games), have a 1084 monitor, joysticks and mouse, these are complete computer (with a couple of external floppy drives), and I have tons of floppies and many brand new blank floppies.

The problem is that they don't have a hard drive, and I have no idea
of how much memory they have installed (I can check) and  I noticed
how long do programs and games take to load.. How do I install a hard
drive o sd memory or cd reader in these things?

My other option is to just use an old PC computer (an amd atlhon 2200)
runing Winuae, and live with it (without having to actually put the
real Amigas to work) and a couple of joysticks. And why not, it can
run MAME too.

I'd like to listen about what do you think I should do, use the 1000,
3000 or the pc with winuae.

Thanks in advance.


Daniel
Drumheller, ab, Canada

[Flashlab]

Just try WinUAE and see if you like it. It will be faster than your stock Amigas and there's no floppy loading involved. If you want you can even make your WinUAE setup to use WHDLoad which can install floppy based games to HD on real Amigas for a more user friendly way of loading the games. If you have a parallel port joystick adapter you can connect Amiga port based joysticks to the PC.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

AFAIK the A3000 contains an IDE port, so you can connect a standard <4 gigabyte harddisk in it. Shouldn't be too hard to find in charity shops e.g..
Considering your kids, WinUAE isn't that much user-friendly. And you need to start Windows with it.
There's another option apart from WinUAE, a slim Linux distro which autostarts E-UAE, so it's like your PC actually is an amiga. I don't know what it's called...

[rockape]

Hi danybebe,

see http://www.bboah.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=7&id=1854&artlang=en

"Hard Drive Controllers:   1 x SCSI-II controller"

Regards, Michael

aka rockape

[rockape]

Hi danybebe,

see http://www.bboah.com/index.php?actio...854&artlang=en

Models & Clones/ID #2852/Commodore: A3000

"Hard Drive Controllers:   1 x SCSI-II controller"

Regards, Michael

aka rockape

[gazgod]

The A3000 contains a SCSI port, not IDE and will take 50 pin SCSI Hard discs.
It can only use IDE discs with the addition of a IDE controller such as the Budda.

Gaz

[TheMagicM]

WinUAE hands down.  Its a cheaper alternative to buying outdated/overpriced upgrades.  You can have an A3000 w/a 040, vid card running OS3.9 for next to nothing compared to buying that setup in real life.   I'm using E-UAE under Linux and have all of my old stuff on it and it works great!

[amigaksi]

Hi all.

I want to assemble a working amiga that is actually usable, and is not too
difficult to use (I want my kids to be able to load games too), but  I've
never actually owned or used an amiga in the past until now (but ZX Spectrum, c64s and 128), so I'll have to learn how to use it well (I don't think is too difficult).

- I own an Amiga 1000 and an Amiga 3000, they both work fine (I
personally tested them, I can boot workbench and some games), have a 1084 monitor, joysticks and mouse, these are complete computer (with a couple of external floppy drives), and I have tons of floppies and many brand new blank floppies.

The problem is that they don't have a hard drive, and I have no idea
of how much memory they have installed (I can check) and  I noticed
how long do programs and games take to load.. How do I install a hard
drive o sd memory or cd reader in these things?

My other option is to just use an old PC computer (an amd atlhon 2200)
runing Winuae, and live with it (without having to actually put the
real Amigas to work) and a couple of joysticks. And why not, it can
run MAME too.

I'd like to listen about what do you think I should do, use the 1000,
3000 or the pc with winuae.

Thanks in advance.


Daniel
Drumheller, ab, Canada

Emulation is not the same as using real amiga.  I'll leave it at that for now...

[Karlos]

Emulation is not the same as using real amiga. I'll leave it at that for now...

Nope, it's a lot cheaper, a lot faster and a lot more convenient most of the time

[amigaksi]

Nope, it's a lot cheaper, a lot faster and a lot more convenient most of the time

Until you can refute the points in the other thread (PC has yet to catch up on certain things), you should stop offering advice here as to not mislead people.

[Karlos]

Until you can refute the points in the other thread (PC has yet to catch up on certain things), you should stop offering advice here as to not mislead people.

Unless you can demonstrate why using an emulator is less convenient for the average user, you should shut yer cakehole.

How much would a real system with the fastest 060 available, HD, high end RTG, network and 128 MB ram cost you to set up? And it would still be massively slower than UAE on a reasonable PC for everything, with the sole exception, perhaps, of polling the joyport every 500ns, which I'm quite sure most users couldn't give a toss about.

The experience of using a real amiga is, I agree, an entirely unique one. However, it has no bearing whatsoever on the claim that UAE is far more convenient.

How many real amigas can you put to sleep and resume later? How many real amigas are capable of executing 68K code at the sort of speed UAE's JIT achieves on a 2GHz x86? How many real amigas can be pimped to the extent that AmiKit allows and still run like greased lightning?

Not many, that's for sure.

[cecilia]

Emulation is not the same as using real amiga.  I'll leave it at that for now...

no, it's not the same....but WinUAE is convenient

and right now I think it's the only practical way to have a "portable Amiga" if you install it in a laptop.

and, because it's still Amiga at least in some sense, it's still fun.

it's all about choice and what people can afford or what is available to them.

it's really that simple

[Fester]

I've tried both and like them both. I'd say test the emulation first on your old pc to see if it does the trick for you and your family. It would probably end up being the cheaper solution.

Speaking in terms of "older PCs", WinUAE works very smoothly on my 2.3 ghz 4gb PC with a nice sound card. However, it does poorly for me on a plain mini-itx  VIA 1ghz with 1gb RAM. I'm just saying this because I think we have the mindset that underpowered pc equipment should be able to run emulated Amigas without problem. I'd say, the better the pc, the better altogether.

[Voyager74]

I've got both solutions too, and enjoy one of them more than the other
(Let's leave that at that)

Finding a hard-drive for your real Amigas wouldn't be the most troublesome
issue, installing all them games would, many don't even have genuine hd-installation possibilities.
Face it, they came on a couple of discs in the 90's.
Unless you have some skills in AmigaDOS it could be a pain to get all
games working.
The perks are that you can use your TV as an output directly, and using
real retro digital joysticks.

There is something called WHD-Load however which takes the hassle out
of gaming, it emulates different environments for the "installed" games and runs them of your HD.
WHDLoad works on both real and emulated Amigas.

I'd say you might be easier of getting WinUAE up and running, or a ready
solution like AmiKit or similar on your pc.
It might be easier for your kids to use too once it's set-up with a workbench,
whd-load and some nice icons.

I'm not promoting one over the other, but one is easier...
Since your pc is 2GHz+ (?), as long as you have some extra memory,
you can emulate most systems and consoles, as you pointed out.

[hooligan]

Considering your kids, WinUAE isn't that much user-friendly. And you need to start Windows with it.

I simply cannot think of a more user-friendly way than doubleclicking Winuae-icon and pressing Start-button.