Yeah, maybe I am not an expert here, but not a newbie either. Emulators is just another virtual layer on top of the system, that's all I need to now here. I know some apps are of high voltage consumption.
The lines between virtual machine and emulator are very blurred. The important thing to remember about an emulator is this: You are trying to make a program that is able to represent itself and behave as a piece of hardware. In this case, the hardware in question would be an Amiga. An Amiga runs at a fixed clock rate, uses complex timing interactions, and generally does all sorts of nasty and complex things with the custom chips all the time. Emulating this is not easy, and not very scalable. Even if the CPU is not under "load" processing something, the emulation still needs to synchronize and emulate everything. A massive amount of power is used to emulate an Amiga that is sitting idle at an empty Workbench screen.
What you say makes me think all mobile phones / palmtops are mostly made to rest, should any usage happens, they run out of batteries in several minutes.
Pretty much spot-on. They have a long standby mode, decent low-usage mode, and much shorter full-power mode. My older iPaq can be used for days as a PDA, hours as an MP3 player, and barely more than an hour as a low-powered Amiga. (If I use the overclock util that I suspect Bloodline uses, yeah, PocketUAE will kill it from 100% to <10% in around a half hour -- maybe less.)
But as I said, I am not familiar with mobile emulation (not too many people are there either). It is simply hard to believe, If I did it and saw it before my very eyes, that would shock me and in turn convince. Fine, thanks for the advice I should not bother.
I don't think anyone is saying you shouldn't bother. I'd love to have a newer version of PocketUAE to try. Hey, maybe you'll find the golden optimization that makes it useful. One never knows...
However, what we're trying to say is that it HAS been tried, and really, the results were far from optimal. If you lived around the Detroit area, you'd more than welcome to borrow my iPaq for a couple days if you don't believe me. :-(
And, the sad truth is, the Windows Mobile and Palm platforms are on their last legs, and haven't really added much since then.
Alas, how can you explain this
1) three emulators (at least) were made already for mobile devices to imitate Amiga
2) someone must have been using this for real
3) there are many other mobile emulations, except for the Amiga.
1) It's cool bragging rights to run an emulator on your mobile device. There's no getting over this. Amiga is the coolest retro machine. It's a natural fit for people to try. Heck, you want to, right?
2) Sure. I've used it. But what do you mean "for real"? Really, what good is a mobile, very simplistic, very slow Amiga that kills your batteries so quickly? Bloodline says he managed to get A500 speed out of an iPaq 4150 and PocketUAE. I have a model in that 4150 family, too... My honest assessment of PocketUAE is about 2/3rd's A500 speed with very poor sound, and very poor keyboard support. Not really the most useful thing ever. (Though, cool as hell, no doubt. I still have it installed! It'll play Nuclear War decent, and I can complete a game before the battery dies.)
3) Other devices emulate easier. VirtualTI (TI graphic calculator emulator) is superb. I use it all the time. Way more useful than any other calculator app I've encountered. ClickGamer's excellent PocketCommodore is brilliant, too. A full C64 emulation with good keyboard, sound, and joystick support. Plus it doesn't need quite as much power to run, so the battery life during use isn't so bad. THAT is useful.
Heck, an Amiga emulator that could deliver that performance would be useful, too. I just don't see the math working out for it, though. Amiga is WAY more complex than a calculator or C64. Complexity means needing more CPU cycles. CPU cycles kill batteries. There's no way around those facts. :-(
