Emulators better than the real thing?

[foleyjo]

What about the feel of the buttons
The wirring of the disk drives
The click the drive makes when its not in use
The messing about with hardware and software
and what about the speed for you to be able to start using it
Set up your amiga and your pc and power them on at the same time to load a game of lets say....cannon fodder
By the time you have inserted disk 2 on the Amiga you might have windows loaded and be starting to open uae :lol:

The  AA+CTRL reset much better than F12.

There are some things an emulator just cant emulate. Its like the C64 emulators. Games may load faster but you miss out on the feeling you get when the loading music stops and the picture vanishes and you know in a moment your game is going to load. If you want retro gaming you might as well get the whole experience

Oh and the guy who mentioned the comparisons of Quake. I think the fact you can play Quake on a real amiga in the first place is more impressive than emulating it

also GP2X amiga emulation I like because I cant really take my amiga on a bus with me

  :lol:

[uncharted]

foleyjo wrote:
What about the feel of the buttons
The wirring of the disk drives
The click the drive makes when its not in use

Actually, there are options for emulating disk drive noises in WinUAE.

[foleyjo]

yeah but its not a real wirring its just a wav file.

Its like when people say hearing a live band is better than hearing a recording

[cv643d]

Some modules sounds weird in WinUAE. Some custom formats do not play right, I was chocked when I listened to them on my A1200, it was like a totally different tune :-)

[mdwh2]

HellCoder wrote:
An emulator can never be better than the real thing. If it emulates something so that the whole system runs faster than the original you're not emulating the original anymore. Look at the definition of emulation.

You're still using an A500 then, because anything faster wouldn't be better?

(And in fact, UAE _does_ win on this argument, as you can set the speed to match A500 speed, or give it a range of speeds, where as a real Amiga that's faster than the "original", you're stuck with it.)

[KThunder]

every year emulation gets better than real for one big reason: our amigas are dying, in 2007 so far i have heard of at least a half a dozen real miggies that have died. and a bunch that have been purposely killed or tossed. 500s, 1200s 4000s bad cpus custom chips capaciters etc...

eventually it wont matter to most of us if real is better or not it doesnt matter to me. my amiga 3000 is the last real amiga i will buy (yes ive said something similar before (yes to my wife)but i really mean it this time(again))


when a pc dies who really cares, you go down to your local pc place and buy parts or a whole new machine, you cant do that with an amiga you have to get parts or a machine that are about as old as what just died.

[rdolores]

For apps that do not use the Amiga's custom chips, ie Workbench friendly, emulation may be better because it can take advantage of the latest hardware, ie newer Video Modes via Picasso96 and newer Sound Cards via AHI. Also, it is cheaper and easier to set up more modern things like Ethernet, Internet, CD-Burners, USB devices, etc...

However, apps that depend on Amiga's custom chips, especially Sound apps that need Paula, the real thing cannot be duplicated exactly. So sounds/music can sound different in emulation.

I use WinUAE for emulation on my WinXP machine and it's quite amazing. I also have Amithlon on a PIII-1000 machine which is really amazing. But I still keep my classics (see my sig) and use them once in a while.

[coldfish]

foleyjo wrote:
Set up your amiga and your pc and power them on at the same time to load a game of lets say....cannon fodder
By the time you have inserted disk 2 on the Amiga you might have windows loaded and be starting to open uae :lol:

For me it would take longer to go the "real" route when a bout of Amiga gaming nostalgia would hit.  

-First, I'd have to get the machine out of the closet,
-set it up,
-locate floppies,
-wait 1-2min for loading,
-play.
-put it all away again.

Total: (not including play) ~30-60 mins.

OR

-with my Laptop in hibernation (it always is),
-lift the lid,
-wait 20-30 seconds to boot,
-run WinUAE click the ADF,
-press END+PAUSE during loading,
-play.
-close lid.

Total: (not including play) 5 mins.

:lol:

[Malakie]

Hi,

There is nothing like using a REAL Amiga however I also have to give kudos to WinUAE for helping keep the Amiga alive.  Things I cannot run on my Amiga I can run using WinUAE.  Not only that, I have been able to replace applications I lost in my house fire thanks to WinUAE and being able to create Amiga disks using ADF files.

Finally, I always wanted an Amiga laptop.  In essence I now have one.  I have a PIII Panasonic Toughbook from my Law enforcement days that I use.  It boots right to WinUAE and AmigaOS in essence giving me my psuedo Amiga Laptop!  I was also able to strip Windows down to bare nothing on that machine since I do not use Windows at all on it.

You can imagine how many people look at my Amiga laptop and start asking, Wow what kind of system is that!   :lol:

After changing the boot pictures and such, it is pretty funny when you think that all Windows is on this machine is a boot loader utility... a well deserved place in my opinion. At least as a boot load util, Windows seems to work pretty darn well! :-P

[amigakid]

OK my 2 cents, I bought Amiga Forever, have to say very nice and well done.  I really like it and on my laptop its almost like a portable Amiga so that's kool.  I have to say though hands down I choose a original Amiga over it.  First Can the emulation run a Video Toaster?, secondly I have problems running some of my Amiga CD32 games (whiles others run fine).  Alot of people talk about the tweaks and control and settings, hell I dont have a lot of time to keep trying 5 million different settings combinations, not when i can turn on the A4000 or my cd32 and run the games flawlessly.  Besides having to boot into windows, then into workbench kinda sucks and takes away the effect that you get when you turn on your trusty miggy.  People say rendering is faster  DUH! lets see rendering on a 50MHZ machine with 18MB RAM vs a 2000MHZ machine with 1024MB RAM.  Anyways The emulators are a lot better than they were a few years ago and they do still have the sound/video sync prob, but they also are very nice.  I do like the Amiga Forever program and am very happy about purchasing it, but to honestly say it's better than the real thing... it just doesn't feel like an Amiga.  Cheers

[hamtronix]

Lets see sex on video or sex for real... which is better? much like sex, sex on video (emulator) is MUCH safer , quicker and more convenient. But sex for real (real hardware) is much longer and much more satisfying when it works out properly.

straight from the horses mouth.

[swift240]

A real Amiga is better than any emulator sound for a start a emulator cant get it absolutely 100% correct near very near perhaps.

Winuae is a lot faster I will give it that for sure.
I run an Athlon 1.7 gig 512 meg of memory, and that is damned fast compared to my 030/40.
BUT, I prefer a real Amiga to an emulator.

For me its just one of those things a matter of personal taste.

I like to run both to be honest the emulator Winuae/Amikit to see just how far it can go, and what can be done with it, that always interests me. So in a way I get the best of both.
But a real Amiga is a real Amiga and thats it for me. And by the way with a real Amiga you get to know what its true capabilities/limitations are, with an emulator you just simply cant, why? because it is an emulator and never the real thing.

Mike.
 :-)

[coldfish]

hamtronix wrote:
Lets see sex on video or sex for real... which is better? much like sex, sex on video (emulator) is MUCH safer , quicker and more convenient. But sex for real (real hardware) is much longer and much more satisfying when it works out properly.

straight from the horses mouth.

...continuing your analogy;

Real = sex with an old, creaky spanish woman who only does mish.

Emulation = sex with a young, very flexable woman who knows 100's of techniques.

 :lol:

[vic20owner]

Well, after a couple weeks of tweaking, hacking, and rebooting my A1200 trying to get various demos and games installed via WHDload, my success rate is about 50%.

Many games (future wars, neuromancer) refused to run and just crashed my machine.  State of the Art still doesn't work.

Maybe it doesn't like where my accelerator maps memory, who knows.

In some cases I could adf2disk to a disk image for installation... but dms write to my virtual disks always fails, unless I use FMS, which doesn't allow inserting and removing disks on the fly.

So my opinion is that overall, WinUAE is MORE compatible than just one Amiga, while the overall experience and "Amiga Feeling" you get is better on the real machine.

So I still like playing with the real thing... but it's frustrating at times.

[a-pex]

>Emulators better than the real thing?

Never ever  :-D Real men play with real hardware  ;-)

[murple]

vic20owner wrote:
Well, after a couple weeks of tweaking, hacking, and rebooting my A1200 trying to get various demos and games installed via WHDload, my success rate is about 50%.

No offense, I had some similar issues before too... but I suspect that a large part of your problems are due to PEBKAC errors.