ral-clan wrote:
Something I've been thinking about for a while....
1. Real Amiga hardware is breaking down.
2. Many don't want to use Amiga emulation because emulation does not "feel right" due to the fact that custom chip funtctions aren't documented, only reverse engineered.
No, the Hardware was well documented, though obviously many of the bugs in the Amiga chipset were not well documented... The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware", the fact that Emulations use modern display and audio devices and thus lack the inherent flaws in the older devices... and the lack of "ritual" required to get the Emulation running.
3. Then perhaps someone can produce an unpopulated PCI card where the user could insert a real PAUL, AGNES, DENISE, KICKSTART, etc. (from a dead Amiga).
Why bother... the amount of work required to get it to sync up, you may as well just use UAE... plus, do you really want to plug a TV, Amiga Mouse, Amiga Keyboard into your PC?... You would prefer to just use the I/O of the PC... bang... let's just use UAE...
4. The emulator (UAE) could recognise and use these real Amiga custom chips on the PCI card. It would only have to emulate the CPU and other address things (or heck - one could even put a real 68000 CPU on the card as an option).
To Sync with real hardware is a pain..
This has been done to an extent with the C64 SID chip PCI cards.
The SID chip is basically a simple but quirky Synth on a chip, that is quite desirable... the Amiga is a more integrated system, with the individual parts not doing much on their own...