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.
