AGA Question

[darkage]

haha SoftAGA good joke..  Couldn't find any references on the net.

What the?!?!?!     seriously VMware for 68k even better joke   Poor little machine will have its CPU clock cycles abused crawling to a halt..  Poor Amiga!  

[dougal]

Just as much as how WhichAmiga reports that the graphics chipset is OCS or ECS or AGA or P96, instead of software emulation is it possible to have AGA on say a Zorro card just as you would have P96?

Imagine a RTG card but instead of P96 or whatever it would be AGA or both.

I'm not suggesting it is possible to make, or easy, or financially viable but i'm just curious.

[drHirudo]

Emulation can't make old hardware do more then it was originally capable of...  Emulation just creates "virtual hardware" using the copious amounts of computing power we have today.  I don't think you would have the CPU power on even an '040 for that type of emulation...

Not always true. There are Sinclair spectrum emulators like Spec 256 that make 256 colors possible in Sinclair programs. If something similar is done in UAE or real Amigas, you can have 16 million colors in ECS games. Not that the Amiga 500 will show them, but running Amiga 500 games under UAE will make the games much more colorful. Just like the FPSE emulator on Amiga emulates the Playstation with better graphic when you use the Warp3D plug-in.

[drHirudo]

Just as much as how WhichAmiga reports that the graphics chipset is OCS or ECS or AGA or P96, instead of software emulation is it possible to have AGA on say a Zorro card just as you would have P96?

Imagine a RTG card but instead of P96 or whatever it would be AGA or both.

I'm not suggesting it is possible to make, or easy, or financially viable but i'm just curious.

There will not be much gain in having AGA card instead of RTG, because the AGA games will not work, since they access directly the registers.
I remember 10 years ago the Amiga users with upgraded machines and RTG cards used to have two monitors - one for AGA gaming/stuff and one for RTG.

@darkage

What the?!?!?! seriously VMware for 68k even better joke Poor little machine will have its CPU clock cycles abused crawling to a halt.. Poor Amiga!

VMware alike solutions exist for Amiga long before VMware was even founded! The most popular such solutions were for emulation of Apple Machintosh machines - ShapeShifter, Fusion emulators use the CPU NATIVELY, and emulate other parts of the Mac hardware.

Technically the Apple and Atari machines were easy to emulate provided you share the same CPU. For the consoles like Sega Mega Drive it's much harder, that's why there are no Mega Drive emulator that uses the 68K CPU natively.

[darkage]

@darkage

VMware alike solutions exist for Amiga long before VMware was even founded! The most popular such solutions were for emulation of Apple Machintosh machines - ShapeShifter, Fusion emulators use the CPU NATIVELY, and emulate other parts of the Mac hardware.

Technically the Apple and Atari machines were easy to emulate provided you share the same CPU. For the consoles like Sega Mega Drive it's much harder, that's why there are no Mega Drive emulator that uses the 68K CPU natively.

When I think of VMware Im thinking of emulating everything via software not using the native hardware resources directly, like in your example of using 68k directly to emulate other platforms that use the same CPU.   Emulating anything in hardware is elegant, thats why theres 8086, 286, 286, 486 etc bridgeboards/emulator cards..   Those are fast solutions compared to purely software ie vmware..

[drHirudo]

When I think of VMware Im thinking of emulating everything via software not using the native hardware resources directly, like in your example of using 68k directly to emulate other platforms that use the same CPU.   Emulating anything in hardware is elegant, thats why theres 8086, 286, 286, 486 etc bridgeboards/emulator cards..   Those are fast solutions compared to purely software ie vmware..

quote from Wikipedia VMware page

VMware software does not emulate an instruction set for different hardware not physically present. This significantly boosts performance.

The same way works ShapeShifter on classic Amigas, that's why it's so fast even if emulation relatively powerful (for it's age) hardware.

The AGA is an extension to the ECS, but to emulate AGA on ECS/OCS machine, you will need to emulate the extra hardware/registers/modes, thus it will be very slow, not to mention that you will need to capture the access of the AGA hardware and translate it to ECS instructions --> slow.

[utri007]

How hard would be modify Shapeshifter to "emulate" amiga, with 68k amigas? Could it be possible to add some kind of wrapper to open nodos games for custom screen? That would be great benefit for those who has a RTG amiga.

Shapshifter doesn't emulate 68k cpus and turboEVD uses MMU to display screen to AGA screen, would it be possible to do that opposite for AGA/RTG? It wouldn't be emulator, so it could be useable?

About ten years ago there was a conexant virtual PC, it was usable with 166mhz pentium MMX

[jj]

How hard would be modify Shapeshifter to "emulate" amiga, with 68k amigas? Could it be possible to add some kind of wrapper to open nodos games for custom screen? That would be great benefit for those who has a RTG amiga.

Shapshifter doesn't emulate 68k cpus and turboEVD uses MMU to display screen to AGA screen, would it be possible to do that opposite for AGA/RTG? It wouldn't be emulator, so it could be useable?

About ten years ago there was a conexant virtual PC, it was usable with 166mhz pentium MMX

How would that work ?  If a game takes over the system and bangs the hardware how woul you trap the calls to the aga chipset to emulate it ?

The only way you can do it it to emulate the entire machine

[utri007]

Some kind of virtual layer that just forward requests.

[warpdesign]

All these dreams... What's wrong with UAE ?

[utri007]

Uea is useless with real 68k amigas and vmware style ssolution would ne great addon for natami

[Piru]

Some kind of virtual layer that just forward requests.

It is not possible, you cannot "just forward requests". In order to get AGA features you need to implement full display chipset emulation (the slowest part of the whole emulation stack anyway). This is so slow that it is unimaginable to get it perform in any sensible way on a 68k.

[Kesa]

All these dreams... What's wrong with UAE ?

I would rather die than use UAE!   :destroy:

[Jupp3]

...or some sort of patcher program.

Yes, it definitely can be done with patches. One example that comes to my mind is Alien Breed 3D II - TKG RTG patch.

The problem is... They're pretty much "per-game", without much reusability for different games. And probably next to impossible for games, which use AGA in the way it was designed to be fastest to use.

Games that don't benefit at all from AGA (compared to chunky gfx cards) like TKG are easy, as it basically creates graphics in chunky format (as used natively by basically all gfx cards) and just converts them to planar format in the end. So basically you "only" need to disable the conversion, and forward chunky data elsewhere (of course initialization etc. is needed aswell)

On the other hand, games like Capital Punishment use planar graphics to create transparent layers. You would need to merge planes manually into chunky pixels, and THAT is slow.

And yes, I am ignoring sprites completely. Those need much more effort on RTG (I guess TKG doesn't use them, at least in-game)

-EDIT-

How easy is this?

The amount of such patches should give some hint. :lol:

[warpdesign]

Uea is useless with real 68k amigas and vmware style ssolution would ne great addon for natami

Why would you need UAE or VMWare on a 68k Amiga ?

Natami is supposed to be 100% compatible with old Amiga chipset: what would you need vmware for ?

[Zac67]

Three solutions:
1) Either get yourself an old Wintel machine (2+ GHz practically free) and run UAE on top of Windoze or Linux - you don't have to look at the host OS if you don't want to. Hey, what's so bad about UAE? You're emulating anyway.
2) Get yourself a '1200 on a card' and plug it next to your RTG card. There's none available you say? Guess what, seems it's not that easy... (Still waiting for a Minimig or Natami on PCI/PCIe though.)
3) Keep phantasizing about emulation, VMware and such until you drop dead. Can't be done that way. Read a book on 68k assembly, learn a bit and start coding. See? Can't be done.

NB: VMware really is a bit like what Shapeshifter did. They both provide the environment (a virtual machine) for running an 'alien' (more or less) OS on top of a guest OS. Shapeshifter could do it as MacOS software was so extremely system friendly that it "just" needed to modify the system drivers to use Amiga hardware instead. VMware in combination with current CPU features creates a complete virtual hardware with fully functional MMU etc so any OS runs on top of it (I'm not sure, but I think you can run an ESXi on top of an ESXi - I need to try that one day!). But this is no wizardry either - just look at the hard time they're having when it comes to proper GPU support.