AGA Question

[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.

[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.