Using a PC as an accelerator? Had an idea last night....

[Linde]

bloodline wrote:
2) Once you've built this new CPU board, you would want to add USB, a sound chip, a GFX chip, perhaps S-ATA (you pretty much get all these things for free with the x86 support chips)... then you have to ask yourself what is the Amiga actually doing? Why have I bothered to build an interface to the Amiga when everything is now offloaded to the new board...

What exactly does the amiga do when it's connected to a PPC accelerator and a Mediator with a Voodo 3 card and a Soundblaster? What's wrong with using a Voodo 3 and a Soundblaster from the PCI bus of the PC instead? A "well expanded" Amiga these days is just a bunch of hardware loosely held together by an A1200 motherboard anyway.

bloodline wrote:
But all this revolves around the flawed assumption that UAE is less compatible than real hardware, this really isn't true anymore.

I hate to burst your bubble, but have you looked at the changelog over the past few versions? If it wasn't "less compatible" than real hardware, why would they still be fixing emulation bugs? Oh, and there are the inherent flaws like the slightly delayed input and delayed sound output. I'm not saying UAE sucks. It's just that chipset emulation still doesn't compare to the real deal, especially when it comes to AGA. I think the developers would agree with me.

Of course, the idea is probably not economically viable, and I don't think any sane developer would pick it up, but one can always hope. Some very advanced hobby projects have gone pretty far thanks to devoted and passionate developers, like the Minimig or the 1541 Ultimate.

[Linde]

bloodline wrote:
If you are going to use the PC's RAM, why not use the PC's GFX and Sound cards? Why not use it's Keyboard and Mouse... in fact why waste time with the Amiga at all, and JUST RUN UAE...

Had you not ignored my last message in this thread maybe you would have taken a hint. The original idea was to use a PC as a classic styled CPU accelerator with FastRAM. While support for RTG graphics and PC sound is excellent in WinUAE, AGA emulation is still not quite there, so there's definitely a hole to be filled by a new accelerator for classic amigas. Now it's just a matter of how to do it, and I think this idea is excellent.

If you don't agree there's still no use in coming here and calling the thread a "wankfest". We're toying and dreaming about an idea, and there's no harm in that, so there's no need to be rude.

[Linde]

Well, I tried booting from the CF card I use in my Amiga in the latest version of WinUAE (based on the A1200 quckstart configuration with "best compatability"), emulating my setup (stock 1200 with 8mb expansion RAM).

First game I tried was Lionheart (since it uses a lot of visual effects based on graphics timing) and I randomly get graphical artifacts in the background.

The second game I tried was The Addams Family (less hardware wank), which worked very well except that the sound from when you jump on an enemy would randomly be reduced to just a "click" noise. This could be because of my sound settings, though, but I don't usually experience the problem of sounds disappearing in other games.

The third game I tried was Agony, which works great until you move the player to the bottom of the playfield and fire. Strange looking artifacts appear on the top of the playfield.

None of these are even AGA games, and these bugs don't appear on the real machine.

As I pointed out earlier there's no need to try every piece of software when you can just have a look at the WinUAE changelog and see what bugs were fixed in chipset emulation over the last few versions. Do you really think that the AGA bug that was fixed in 1.5.0 ("AGA mode sprite garbage may have appeared in some cases.") would be the final one?

Honestly I think that you should just get over your besserwisser attitude until you actually get a clue.