Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Amiga Emulation => Topic started by: detz on January 12, 2005, 03:17:30 PM
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I have just played around with uae briefly and am impressed. Seeing as I only use my amiga for running octamed I am considering getting rid of my real amiga. Can anyone tell me the pro and cons of this, as I could use the money right now (PPC card to sell on ebay....)
Also does anyone know what settings to use to get the native output to fill a TFT monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024?
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I run OctaMED on WinUAE, on my 3Ghz machine it works like a dream. But I still keep my Miggies as nothing beats the actual sound of a real amiga. :-D
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WinUAE is great - not everyone is lucky enough to have a real Amiga (sadly)...
Only pressing F12 to swap disks occasionally spoils he illusion...
p4
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Got rid of my amiga thinking uae would do the trick, well it comes close and does a good job but here I am with a new amiga. It wasn't real enough for me.
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WinUAE yeah great if you want to run things faster.
Not so great if you want the true Amiga experience, nothing will ever beat the real machines for that.
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On my 3.2GHz PC WinUAE reports it is a 700MHz 68040!!! (With a good benchmark program) Thats with full sound enabled... ADoom and Quake run great on it too! :banana:
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UAE runs all too slow on my Pentium III, 500 MHz. How much faster does it run on let say 2000 MHz Celeron, about 4 times? or faster?
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I use WinUAE mainly for graphics, Dpaint and things like that.
But for games, demos and other fun nothing beats the real deal, the A500 and the A1200. Also the TV should be 21" or bigger and connected by a SCART-to-23pinRGB cable. :-D
So I say keep a minimum bare Amiga for the fun and use UAE for the serious stuff.
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@ CyberStorm
Probably 3 times faster, the Celeron has a much smaller L2 cache than the Pentium, that's why it sells for less. Celerons have essentially the same core as the Pentiums, (they are the ones which didn't make the grade for running at a higher clock speed) minus the expensive L2.
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Star69 wrote:
@ CyberStorm
Probably 3 times faster, the Celeron has a much smaller L2 cache than the Pentium, that's why it sells for less. Celerons have essentially the same core as the Pentiums, (they are the ones which didn't make the grade for running at a higher clock speed) minus the expensive L2.
Any celeron before the Celeron E is a castrated piece of sh1t and not worth touching with someone elses. Literally half the speed of the same clocked P4's in anything where the speed amtters. In things where it didn't they were fine but thats about as much use as a snooze button for a smoke alarm.
Celeron E's however are a bit special. Only seem to be less than 10% slower in the things that matter than a real P4.
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UAE might seem faster on pure cpu power and such, but try a game that really takes advantage of the amiga custom chipset, then you will see that it runs far from as smooth as on the real thing... A scroller game or demo is a real nice test for this.
Emulators can never replace the real thing in my opinion...
But it does depend on what you use it for.. if you are going to for example render something in a amiga rendering program, then i see the advantage using a emulator instead of the standard a1200.
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winuae is great. however no matter how fast cpu you have
games that scroll wont look smooth (directx is crap!).
also full implementation of AGA is not what i call %100 the real amiga is way better in that regard. the real amiga has better sound aswell which is unusual because it's only 8bit!
but yeah winuae has come along way but not long enough.
there should be a program from within winae that calls the floppy changer. the windows floppy changer does spoil the illusion.
but with the offical release of version 1. hopefully it will be better.
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you only have to look at how poor the simple scrolling banner scrrensaver works to realise that windows can't move graphics about smoothly, but apart from maybe playing frontier, payback and a few other classics that shouldn't really bother me,although I could in theory return the a1200 to it's stock config, apart ffrom maybe a hard drive controller and connect it to the pc tv card, that way i'd have the best of both worlds, and raise some cash selling my blizzard ppc and mediator etc. Hmm, but I do enjoy the idea of still using such and old machine on the web etc....
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winuae is great. however no matter how fast cpu you have
OpenGL is definitely better than at this yeah, but it still is far from as good as a amiga, due to limitations in the pc design itself...
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OpenGL is definitely better than at this yeah, but it still is far from as good as a amiga, due to limitations in the pc design itself...
spot on!! man. but hey winuae is FAST though, alot faster than my A1200 anyway.
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UAE might seem faster on pure cpu power and such, but try a game that really takes advantage of the amiga custom chipset, then you will see that it runs far from as smooth as on the real thing... A scroller game or demo is a real nice test for this.
This has more to do with the throttling of chipset timings. Note that the original Amigas had trouble with the CPU and chipset timing fighting with each other, which is one reason why the AGA chipset in the 1200 runs faster than the 4000. I can only get major CPU speed with running in RTG -- this is explained in more detail in the AIAB documentation. Also, things get choppy on my machine without VSync, but with VSync on, things are PERFECTLY smooth -- not a single hickup anywhere. I'm not sure if I should blame the emulation or WinUAE's terrible display code for this. WinUAE really tortures the video system, and it's the only application I run that can regularly lock-up Win2000. That says a lot.
I must say the new versions of WinUAE are really troublesome. I still prefer 8.26 over 1.0RC.
Also, for some weird reason, WinUAE and some older Win95 games run a hell of a lot better on Athlon / nForce than on Pentium / Intel chipset. I think the two use different low-level timers... or something. I prefer AMD for emulating WinUAE. The P4 does weird things.
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hmmmmm thanks for the tip iv got a spare AMD 2000 that i have not used with winuae before might, give better perf
than my 2.0ghz p4.
yeah i can lock up w2000 aswell.
iv made a really nice ntoskrnl.exe file if anyone wants it.
fully amiga hacked logos and logon screen. (sp1 and 2 only)
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Greetings,
I have the best of both worlds! At work, I use winuae(040) on an IBM P3 800Mhz. On speed wise, I'd go for it. Video mode is wonderful. A 16-bit display of true colors(800*600)! Although it does fall behind in terms of sound emulation(set at 100% accuracy). It still sounds like it's going to a tunnel when I'm running song player while browsing the net(very fast LAN 10Mbps).
At home my trusty (030) A1200. The only thing it lack is a 16-bit video card. which I only get an 8-bit display. Dial-up 55k(darn slow) but managable. :-D IMHO, It's like 80's era meets the next millenium fad. Both worlds collide, and rule!!!
Regards,
GiZz72
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Tomas is right, I have found a small number of AGA demos that aren't quite right. For the most part however, it's spot-on. (Many demos and games aren't totally smooth on real amigas, either.) The sound quality is as good or better, but much of it really comes down to your hardware, and how well the emulator is configured for the given task. Many (but not all) instances of poor/choppy graphics performance are due to some setting that needs to be tweaked.
Personally, I prefer WinUAE in almost every way, and have no desire to fire-up the originals (though I keep my 500 and 1200 for nostalgic/collector purposes). It's super-fast, easily customized, you can flick back and forth instantly between Windows and AOS, and it runs about 95% of the things I've tried flawlessly. It's nice to fire up a little Jet Pilot at full detail and framerate (perfectly smooth), on a screen that doesn't make my eyes bleed...something no real amiga could ever manage.
Is it 100% perfect?? No...but IMO, setup correctly on decent hardware, the advantages far outweigh the negatives.
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mikrucio wrote:
winuae is great. however no matter how fast cpu you have
games that scroll wont look smooth (directx is crap!).
also full implementation of AGA is not what i call %100 the real amiga is way better in that regard. the real amiga has better sound aswell which is unusual because it's only 8bit!
I'm not sure what your PC set up is... but on my old Athlon 600Mhz running XP and the latest WinUAE with Vsync switched on, the Screen scrolling is as smoths as any of my Amigas...
I'm having a hard time believeing all the UAE bashing that's going on right now... If you jsut take the time to tweek the CPU/Chipset timing in UAE (not to mention adjusting the chipset features to meet the requirements of the game) you will get a faster system than any Amiga.
I though you Amiga boys like to play with settings? Well play!!!
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@TjLaZer
TjLaZer wrote:
On my 3.2GHz PC WinUAE reports it is a 700MHz 68040!!! (With a good benchmark program) Thats with full sound enabled... ADoom and Quake run great on it too! :banana:
Just out of curiosity, which benchmark program did you use?
Thanks
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yeah vsync to 60hz works Perfectly smoothly on games,
exactly like a real amiga. but vsync on,
enables more precise
chipset timing in the emulation, and hence the emulation
suffers. like in workbench for example boot times and load times are greatly decreased i found. as with boot times and load time with games. it's pretty much as fast as a real 040 amiga 1200. loading from a standard IDE drive.
so the solution is only turn on vsync to 60hz for games.
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mikrucio wrote:
OpenGL is definitely better than at this yeah, but it still is far from as good as a amiga, due to limitations in the pc design itself...
:-o
:lol:
:lol:
:lol:
:-P
Oh...you Amigoids slay me.
(Amigoids, not to be confused with Amigans.)
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Ummm, so all of you run WinUAE without any lagging in sound at all?
Somehow I don't find that true, or maybe just my 1.8Ghz machine is too slow at emulating.
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i didnt write that queer. that supposed to be a quote..
but yeah i can run perfect winuae with no lagging at all.
exactly the same as the amiga. (1.93ghz p4)
the emulation is fastest with vsync off, however as i just mentioned vsync is only good for games and demos.
or anything that you want a perfectly smooth animation for.
AGA is not 100% implemented as their are artifacts in some demos and games regardless of the settings you use.
and yes you better believe this emulation has come a long way. and it will replace your amiga in the near future.
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but vsync on, enables more precise chipset timing in the emulation, and hence the emulation suffers. like in workbench for example boot times and load times are greatly decreased i found
Architectually speaking, the Amiga is too smart for its own good. Everything is syncronous and depends on the chipset timings, so turning on Vsync will slow everything down. Use RTG and turn the floppy drives off, and WinUAE really flies.
Also noteworthy, is the fact the Amiga does all floppy error correction in the CPU, so floppy disk access is always a pain to emulate. You have to emulate the rotation of the disk and everything.
BTW, is it "disc" or "disk" with regards to floppies?
so the solution is only turn on vsync to 60hz for games.
Yeah. I have about ten WinUAE configs, mostly for speed and not for compatibility. Now THAT's why I prefer WinUAE over my genuine 1200. :-)
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Desolator wrote:
Ummm, so all of you run WinUAE without any lagging in sound at all?
Somehow I don't find that true, or maybe just my 1.8Ghz machine is too slow at emulating.
If you're getting lag on the Audio, then blame it on your crappy sound card.
My Edirol FA-101 (on a firewire link), gives me no lag at all.
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To the original poster: if the only thing you use on your Amiga is OctaMED, have you considered the Windoze version?
It's here (http://www.medsoundstudio.com/features.htm) if you're interested.
Still... not a patch on the original MED with the "jumping man" mouse pointer!!
- Ali
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UAE might seem faster on pure cpu power and such, but try a game that really takes advantage of the amiga custom chipset, then you will see that it runs far from as smooth as on the real thing... A scroller game or demo is a real nice test for this.
This is very far from the truth. As long as you have what it takes, hardware-wise smooth scrolling will never be a problem. I seldom have to do more than to play around with the Hz, apply v-sync and voila. I did actually run Turrican II in my old 350MHz Compaq Presario under WinUAE smooth as silk. Never had any problems with this whatsoever on any "new" machine.
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Waccoon wrote:
[BTW, is it "disc" or "disk" with regards to floppies?
quote]
Disk is the magnetic term, and disc is the optical term.
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Well i would not considder swaping your amiga with UAE .
whith my xp 3000 1g ram syspeed shows 68040 1500mhz whitch is total bull btw.I got major lags with mpeg files that i think is quite wierd with a 1500mhz 040 hehe.
Also doing work on uae does some times just jump out to windows wery unstabel memmory leak there some where ..
Well i tried UAE and thought it was quite bad and unstable bought a amiga instead..
:-D :-D adonay
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detz wrote:
you only have to look at how poor the simple scrolling banner scrrensaver works to realise that windows can't move graphics about smoothly
I imagine the screen saver is just badly programmed.
Take a look at a 3D game. Given that any reasonably modern PC can render full 3D environments at hundreds of frames per second, then even if you did scrolling text by rendering texture mapped polygons in 3D, it ought to be perfectly smooth. In general, any 2D game can be done using 3D hardware, so the possible performance should be at least as smooth as what you see in a 3D game.
Now having said that, I don't know well UAE performs at AGA emulation, but it's simply not true to say that "Windows can't move graphics about smoothly".
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BTW, is it "disc" or "disk" with regards to floppies?
For the floppies the right term is disk (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diskette) (as FastRobPlus correctly said :-D), an abbreviation of diskette (a name chosen in order to be similar to the word "cassette") (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk).
The word comes from the greek ?????? wich defines the flat circular geometric form. The Latin word is discus.
Here another explanation (From the Webster's Online Dictionary (http://www.websters-dictionary-online.org/)):
One reason for the distinction is perhaps that the compact disc was invented by Philips, a European company (hence using the British English spelling, disc), whereas the hard disk was invented by IBM, an American company (using the American English spelling, disk). The distinction is mostly found in hardware documentation and is rarely maintained in software documentation for users, where disk is almost always preferred in the interest of consistency.
Another reason, explained in more detail in the external link, is that the audio field typically uses disc, whereas computer circles prefer disk. The CD was originally used solely for its audio applications. After the rise of the CD, some audiophiles began calling phonograph records black discs.
________
Bbw hairy (http://www.fucktube.com/categories/212/hairy/videos/1)
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@Cass
from the greek ÄÉÓÊÏÓ
:lol: I'm sure that hasn't come out as you intended :-)
@Desolator
No - my XP2500 (overclocked to XP3000+) gives me laggy sound with all versions of WinUAE so far. I never considered that it was a dodgy sound system (I'm using the onboard n-Force) - I thought that it was just a limitation of the emulation... time to have a play around tonight! :-)
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My laptop does not do well at all with UAE for audio. I have no problen with my main PC's sound card (SB Audigy), but this laptop (Cirrus/Crystal AC'97) Plays chunks of soundbuffer at random (Updated the drivers and everything, no change :-( ) I wonder if this (http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=204&product=10769) will do the trick? I also wonder if that could be made to work with an A1200? Maybe not, just dreaming! :-)
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Legerdemain wrote:
UAE might seem faster on pure cpu power and such, but try a game that really takes advantage of the amiga custom chipset, then you will see that it runs far from as smooth as on the real thing... A scroller game or demo is a real nice test for this.
This is very far from the truth. As long as you have what it takes, hardware-wise smooth scrolling will never be a problem. I seldom have to do more than to play around with the Hz, apply v-sync and voila. I did actually run Turrican II in my old 350MHz Compaq Presario under WinUAE smooth as silk. Never had any problems with this whatsoever on any "new" machine.
Quite odd that it wont run very smooth on any setting i have tried then.. I have tried both linux and windows version of uae, and cannot even get those games running completly as smooth as my a500 even after experimenting with different settings and enabling vsync..
Or is my amd xp2100, gf4 ti4200 more crappy than your 350mhz compaq?
What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...
Maybe i am just a bit picky about such issues?
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No - my XP2500 (overclocked to XP3000+) gives me laggy sound with all versions of WinUAE so far. I never considered that it was a dodgy sound system (I'm using the onboard n-Force) -
That may be your problem, n-force audio isn't very good, especially if you're using the analog outs.
I get great sound using a cheap SB Live! card with about 95% of the things I try, on occasion I'll have to mess with the soundbuffer but that's about it.
What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...
Tomas that's really strange...it sounds to me like you may have a driver issue, though I entirely agree with you that some things in WinUAE are definately not perfect, you shouldn't be getting random stuttering, nor with PC games and demos.
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mikrucio wrote:
and yes you better believe this emulation has come a long way. and it will replace your amiga in the near future.
That bit made me laugh.
Trust me, UAE won't be replacing any of my Amigas any time soon. It does run on one of them though (the AmigaOne).
And to all those people saying how great WinUAE is and how if you get choppy sound and stuff it's because it's not tweaked correctly, I say this:
1) My Amiga doesn't _need_ any settings to be tweaked. It just runs fine all the time, whether it be graphics or games or whatever.
2) How many times have you been using a real Amiga when all of a sudden the screen goes black and some horribly friendly dialogue box for a completely different app comes up?
3) UAE is a pig to set up for full-screen displays of the right size and right aspect ratios. I like to be able to switch between 1280x1024x32 to AGA PAL 320x256 and still have everything look right _without_ twiddling settings.
4) I like playing around with odd hardware. Can't fit a Zorro III card in a Windows box.
I have yet to see WinUAE run as smoothly as my Amiga on any system (and I've seen some quite good systems). I know my Amiga was way more expensive (Cyberstorm PPC, 68060@50/604e@200, Voodoo III) but that's not the argument. WinUAE is good - but it's not thatgood.
Any of my Amigas be replaced by WinUAE (which, incidentally, I do use regularly)? No thanks.
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@mikrucio
Actually, using the spare bits in the Paula chip used to set volume, you can trick up the sound to play 14 bit from memory. Takes a bit of tricky programming, but is most certainly possible. not bad for an 80's computer :-D
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SHADES wrote:
@mikrucio
Actually, using the spare bits in the Paula chip used to set volume, you can trick up the sound to play 14 bit from memory. Takes a bit of tricky programming, but is most certainly possible. not bad for an 80's computer :-D
That's called subranging... you take two channels, say 1 and 2 (that have the same physical output), then set one channel to 63 (maximum volume) and the other to a volume of 1. Then you play the upper 8bits of the 16bit sample through the maximum volume channel and the lower 8bits through the minimum volume channel.
It was cool 16 years ago, now it's just dumb.
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Quite odd that it wont run very smooth on any setting i have tried then.. I have tried both linux and windows version of uae, and cannot even get those games running completly as smooth as my a500 even after experimenting with different settings and enabling vsync..
Or is my amd xp2100, gf4 ti4200 more crappy than your 350mhz compaq?
What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...
Maybe i am just a bit picky about such issues?
No, I'm most certainly as picky... I get furious every time a frame is skipped or whatever, though in most cases I work around this problem by playing around with the Hz in Windows also... WinUAE tends to "fake" the Hz that is used in the settings, which means that if you run Windows in 85Hz and WinUAE in 60Hz, the 60Hz is fitted within the 85Hz range which obviously makes some frames not syncing like they should, maybe this is DirectX related, I don't know. Furthermore there is this PAL/NTSC issue... if something is run in PAL 60Hz mode using NTSC 59.8Hz (or whatever it is) also results in a frame being skipped eventually. So, yes, there is a lot of tweaking needed to be done, but when it is done correctly it at least in my cases never have behaved annoyingly.
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1) My Amiga doesn't _need_ any settings to be tweaked. It just runs fine all the time, whether it be graphics or games or whatever.
2) How many times have you been using a real Amiga when all of a sudden the screen goes black and some horribly friendly dialogue box for a completely different app comes up?
3) UAE is a pig to set up for full-screen displays of the right size and right aspect ratios. I like to be able to switch between 1280x1024x32 to AGA PAL 320x256 and still have everything look right _without_ twiddling settings.
4) I like playing around with odd hardware. Can't fit a Zorro III card in a Windows box.
Considering that it is more or less impossible to work around some of the issues above when talking about emulation under Windows. Some issues are so obvious that one simply has to accept them or just decide not to use the emulator just because one can't handle the obvious consequences.
I have yet to see WinUAE run as smoothly as my Amiga on any system (and I've seen some quite good systems). I know my Amiga was way more expensive (Cyberstorm PPC, 68060@50/604e@200, Voodoo III) but that's not the argument. WinUAE is good - but it's not thatgood.
I do see your point, but it's not like there isn't issues with real AMiGA:s either. I've tried to come up with a good solution on switching between RTG/AGA in a smooth way on my A1200. Bought myself a flickerfixer/scandoubler and thought that was nice... until I realised I had to get a monitorswitch aswell, and then suddenly the quality of the signal will be somewhat less unless some big money is spent. And even after a monitorswitch is bought, there will be some delays when switching the screens and the AGA frequencies are still rather low so that some monitors don't support them and so on, and so on. I've yet no had this really pleasant experience with handling AGA/RTG on the same screen on a real AMiGA, and in some cases WinUAE does that better.
In the end, what it all comes down to is how one wants to use the AMiGA. In some cases I prefer WinUAE, in some cases i prefer the real thing. They both have advantages.
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In the end, what it all comes down to is how one wants to use the AMiGA. In some cases I prefer WinUAE, in some cases i prefer the real thing. They both have advantages.
Absolutely. That's why it annoys me when someone says that UAE is better than an Amiga in every way - it's simply not. They both are good for their own purposes.
Incidentally, you can get round your problem with RTG/AGA if you buy a graphics card with a pass-through. I ran my A4000 on a CV64 for a while and that worked fine.
If only WinUAE supported AmigaOS 4... then it would be better still, and I could develop for it when away from home. That's the real problem with UAE for me... it's emulating 11 year old technology, while the new Amigas are far in advance of that and still moving. UAE is the past, the (new) hardware has a future, and everybody solely using UAE is stuck in the past while we're trying to push on into the future....