When emulators outperform the real deal.

[Ral-Clan]

Yeah, for productivity Amiga applications (i.e. rendering, graphics, desktop publishing, audio work) WinUAE is great.

I've even enjoyed lots of games on it without a problem.

[Ral-Clan]

Yeah, but for playing classic Amiga games it sucks! For instance, the sound is not synchronous with the game.

Seriously?  I 've heard this complaint for years, but I've NEVER experienced it (and I have both real Amigas and UAE).  I think it's just a matter of people not configuring (or at least tweaking) their UAE setup properly.  I get no controller or sound latency.  In fact, I think if I hid the PC somewhere and set up a real Amiga in front of the monitor, I could fool a real Amigan into thinking I was running from the actual hardware (the new WinUAE can even do scan-lines and CRT blur like a real 1084).

[Ral-Clan]

You may believe that, but it is impossible.

Well, yes.  Of course I understand that absolute zero latency is physically impossible, but there is a point where it become perceptually negligible (i.e. not perceivable) to humans.  Heck, even the human nervous system has a level of latency built in (eg. for an electro-chemical signal to travel from one's brain to one's hand for a joystick push, and then for the incoming signal to the eye to be reprocessed by the brain, for instance).  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the "human nervous system latency" was the slowest link in the whole USB-emulator-LCD chain.

I don't notice any perceivable latency in my WinUAE system as compared to my real Amiga use - even when doing timing critical tasks such as MIDI music recording in Bars & Pipes where screen updates must occur when the music notes scroll by.  And I went into this whole UAE thing very skeptical that it would be able to perform like a real Amiga in this regard - search for some of my old posts from pre-2008 and you will see I was anti-emulation and pro real hardware (heck, I still love real hardware, I've just been convinced that UAE is also up to the task if tweaked properly).

[Ral-Clan]

The same counts for you:
Can you explain which WinUae (sound) configuration you have, please?

As I have explained it many times before on Amiga.org, I don't feel like re-typing it all again. Here is one of my old posts:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=728120&postcount=23

Read the whole thread.  I was able to solve this guy's latency problems.

[Ral-Clan]

Thanks ral-clan. I'll try these settings and see if it solves my problems.

Also be sure you're using a recent version of WinUAE.

[Ral-Clan]

You CANNOT replicate watching an Amiga scene demo on Real Hardware with an RGB monitor with the Real Amigas analogue sound output. Period. End of story. Sure you can mimick the look on a lcd or crt with scanlines and crap but its not the same, the colors arent as rich for one. And there is no pc hardware out there that has the low end phat analogue amiga sound.

Richer colours are just a factor of the chroma signal strength (i.e. saturation setting).  If you want richer colours in WinUAE, increase the saturation of the emulator's video output, or the colour setting of the monitor.  Heck, there's nothing stopping you from using a CRT monitor with WinUAE....you could even use a TV card to output straight to a 1084 if you really wanted to.

As for the Paula's "phat analogue amiga sound"...the Paula is a digital chip, NOT analogue like the SID is.  It operates in the digital realm then has an digital to analogue converter to feed audio signals out to the real world, just like any PC sound card or PC motherboard sound chip does (except the PC's A/D converter can operate in 8, 16 or 24 bits instead of just 8 bits).

I'm not saying that hardware Amigas are bad -- they're fantastic -- but I just think your arguments about why emulation cannot match the real thing are not based on sound information.

The only thing that emulation will never be able to match is the feeling of a real Amiga keyboard, sliding in a disk, the real Amiga mouse feel - i.e. the physical, tactile elements.  But I'd bet that if you put a PC motherboard in an A500 case and ran WinUAE outputting to a CRT monitor, with a Keyrah adapter to the original keyboard, and some sort of adapter to allow you to use a real Amiga mouse, you could trick many people into believing that the hardware (i.e. circuits) inside was original.

[Ral-Clan]

Only problem here you have to boot through Windows first...that destroyed everything in there by itself. Making the desire for the real thing out beats your argument...at least for me it did.

Yes you have to boot through Windows....or Linux to start UAE, but you can always make a minimal, stripped down installation where you don't even see the host OS.  Other than the BIOS screen which displays when your computer turns on, you will be booting straight into AmigaOS.  Maybe on some motherboards you can even disable the BIOS display screen - so straight from power-on you will only see AmigaOS booting.  The Cloanto Amiga Forever CD can boot like this (just put it straight into your DVD drive, turn on the computer and you're straight into Amiga OS) and I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for people to hide the little linux boot screen that shows for a few seconds even with that setup.

Anyway, my point wasn't about the booting process, it was about the actual feel of the emulation when it was running as compared to an actual hardware Amiga when it was running.  I'll bet if you had both a real A500 and an A500 empty case with PC/WinUAE inside it running the same game and outputting to identical monitors, set up side by side, then you sat a person in front to play both, few would be able to tell which was real hardware inside the case and which was emulation.