whdload vs. WinUAE for classic Amiga Games

[coldfish]

Ive tried all the above options, and settled on WinUAE;
+because I use a PC every day, I might as well run emulation on that machine.  And it's nice to have a virtual Amiga on my laptop.
+its free (*and legal if you have real KS roms and Disks kicking around).
+compatability is very good and constantly improving.
+HD image compat', so yes Whdload/installers work
+convenience, different Amiga hardware configs at the click of a button.
+use a real Amiga HD with it.
+its free*!
+more power than any of my real Amigas and better specs, (I never owned a real Picasso gfx card).
+AIAB, a highend OS3.9 install virtual Amiga which puts my old 3.1 A1200 to shame.
+its free*!!!
-not "real".

Classic gaming with my A1200 '030;
+a few games ran faster and better than the old A500 eg Syndicate, Fronteer, Cannon Fodder ect.
+novelty of having a whole lot of older A500 stuff working on a newer more powerful -real- Amiga.
+an Amiga with a HD is awesome if all you've ever known was an A500 with floppies.
-upgrading the A1200 to '030 meant some older floppy games stopped working unless under Whdload.
-Whdload = still some compatability issues.
-installing with half-dead floppies sucks arse when the installer crashes on the last floppy of a 12-disk install.
-takes up space.
-using an A1200 feels horribly slow and clumsy at times.
-hardware is very costly for what it is.

An A500 with floppies;
+authentic!
-slow!
-while it's the "real" -real- thing, why torture yourself?  Most floppies have probably reached the end of their usable life, so there's always the chance of data loss/corruption.  -an A500 and floppies take up a lot of space.
-floppy drive reliability?
-ADF conversion to Amiga disks can be time consuming and awkward.

[coldfish]

Roondar wrote:

So, concluding:

Yes, WinUAE is surely faster and more convenient than using a real Amiga (with or without HD).

No, WinUAE does not give the same smoothness for scrolling and missing digital joysticks sucks. Not too mention it always looks more blocky than on a TV  ;-)

(And somehow, even on my PIV 3.2Ghz there are still Amiga programs -mostly those that really bang the hardware- that struggle to reach A500 speeds in WinUAE)

Ahh, godblessya, I think the scrolling problems have more to do with the faster (lower persistence) PC display device than emulation, I run WinUAE through a HTPC & SDTV setup, it's just like the old days.

I use a Sidewinder digital pad which is just as good if not better than the old Sega-MS pad I used with my A1200.

The HTPC is a Duron @1Ghz, it does a fine job of emulating an A500, I think you should check your settings/configs if your having speed issues with a P4 @ 3.2Ghz?  Or prhaps try an older, faster, (less accurate) version, Im running 0.8.8r8 and 0.9.91.0.

[coldfish]

Well, I can only vouch for my own experience with WinUAE.

Regardless of whether you believe it or not this little Duron based HTPC runs an emulated A500 just fine, no frameskip, no sound skipping.  I can only guess you're doing something wrong or running stuff that would hobble a real A500?  Or perhaps its time for a Win reinstall?  :-P

According to Amiga Forever:

http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/3-101.html

"While many users are satisfied with the performance of the emulation low-end systems such as those powered by Pentium 90 to Pentium 200 CPUs, we recommend a Pentium processor running at 750 MHz as a minimum configuration. This provides a quite usable environment, roughly comparable to the speed of an Amiga 500 with a fast hard disk, inclusive of custom chips emulation. In this configuration, the emulated CPU can be several times as fast as that of an A500, while the Amiga chip set is emulated in real time in most usage scenarios (including most games).

With emulation running on Intel Pentium CPUs, the original performance of the Amiga chip-set is achieved in the range between 400 MHz and 1 GHz, depending on the resources used by the software (games are the most demanding applications). In comparison, the performance of CPU-intensive Amiga tasks on newer and more powerful GHz-class PCs can be defined as stunning: jobs which used to take minutes or hours on "real" Amiga systems only take seconds when run inside the emulation. Additional performance comparisons are included in the FAQ list, and in the section on Emulation."

Give me some examples of games that "crawl" and I'll try them out myself.  I have no doubt there are demos that will stress the system and maybe even cause a frame-drop now and then but I'm yet to come across anything that causes it to "crawl".

I really cant criticise WinUAE for features and performance.

...did I mention its free! :-)

[coldfish]

Its possible your preference for accuracy over speed it the problem.  I dont bother with 100% sound accuracy and dont mind tweaking down compatability when using WinUAE on my old Compaq E500 @ 600Mhz.  On the HTPC I dont need to.  Another nice thing is the HTPC has 768 x 576 and 720 x 576 output for that authentic, everything in it's right place Amiga experience.

Accuracy vs Speed is one of those things.  Some people prefer older versions of Mame becuase newer versions make their emulation crawl, I dont mind using neoRageX instead of Mame to run NeoGeo stuff, eventhough it's less "accurate", the overall gaming experience is still fun and there's no framedrops and no soundskips, which is the number one spoiler imo.

Ironically, shooting for accuracy may be why your having trouble getting WinUAE to run at full clip on a 3.2Ghz machine.  It's probably best you stick with a real A500, 1084s and a box of floppies. :-P

[coldfish]

Roondar wrote:

Or in my case a choice between an A600 with CompactFlash HDD and a towerised A1200 with accelerator etc :-)

Anyway, I think in the end it does come down to personal oppinion and feeling more than any technical merits. WinUAE is a fine piece of software and if you like using it, go right ahead. If you're like me you'll probably find that an original Amiga can't be beat in terms of how close it is to the original tho :-P

On the emulators thing: I actually don't mind not-so-accurate emulation for systems I haven't owned/own.

Somehow I always get very picky when I emulate something I have in my own home 'for real'. One of the reasons I disliked the Playstation emulators for instance was that the sound was always 'off' a tad. In the end I just used my PS2 to play PS1 games, even though the emulator gave me higher res and faster loading.

Dont get me wrong, nothing matches real hardware for the complete experience.  Ive had an A500 and an A1200 running Whdload with stacks of old A500 stuff installed.  It was all good for a long time, but after a while I noticed WinUAE was quicker and more convienient for the quick hack, esp' as the host PC was already on.  The "real" hardware with slow loading times, dodgy floppies and compatability issues eventually went in the closet.  Btw, it's arguable that running an A500 game on an A1200 using Whdload is unauthentic and inaccurate too. :-P

Btw, I tried both SOTB and Turrican today on the HTPC, with maxed sound settings 100%, 48kHz ect. Maxed compatability, Display; Vsync on, 16bit(ofcourse), 720x576 fullscreen ect ect...

Turrican ran smooth, SOTB had maybe (maybe!) a slight stutter on the top (foremost and fastest) layer of the parallax scrolling, otherwise smooth.  I cant say the latter quibble made it unplayable.  ;-)

Youre right, it comes down to personal opinion and what's fun for you; someone who enjoys the hardware side is never going to like an emulation, someone who just wants a quick thrash of some old favourites wont be too fussed.

Having said that, the floppy drive "click" feature is a nice authentic touch.  

[coldfish]

Legerdemain wrote:
Oh, so you ran 720x576 without any filtering turned on, using H&V centering to achieve the most 'real' experience on your TV-set?

I just have to ask you, how do you do to define a 720x576 screenmode (and what gfx-card do you have) because I've been wanting to define my own resolution for a long time on my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro & Radeon 9600... but I haven't figured out a way to do so.

The HTPC has a Gf2-GTS gfx card with a Chrontel TV chip, connected to my TV by RGB/Scart.  I use TV-Tool to output from the card at 720x576 or 768x576.  I did have to modify the card for RGB-TV as per the instructions on the TV-Tool website and it takes a little tweaking to get the resolutions working right.  Different TV chips produce different results, I hunted this one down on ebay specifically for this purpose.

Try TV-Tool anyway, you may be able to get PAL&NTSC resolutions working?

http://tvtool.info/index_e.htm

Also, try Powerstrip:

http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm