UAE vs real A1200

[Legerdemain]

UAE might seem faster on pure cpu power and such, but try a game that really takes advantage of the amiga custom chipset, then you will see that it runs far from as smooth as on the real thing... A scroller game or demo is a real nice test for this.

This is very far from the truth. As long as you have what it takes, hardware-wise smooth scrolling will never be a problem. I seldom have to do more than to play around with the Hz, apply v-sync and voila. I did actually run Turrican II in my old 350MHz Compaq Presario under WinUAE smooth as silk. Never had any problems with this whatsoever on any "new" machine.

[Legerdemain]

Quite odd that it wont run very smooth on any setting i have tried then.. I have tried both linux and windows version of uae, and cannot even get those games running completly as smooth as my a500 even after experimenting with different settings and enabling vsync..

Or is my amd xp2100, gf4 ti4200 more crappy than your 350mhz compaq?

What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...

Maybe i am just a bit picky about such issues?

No, I'm most certainly as picky... I get furious every time a frame is skipped or whatever, though in most cases I work around this problem by playing around with the Hz in Windows also... WinUAE tends to "fake" the Hz that is used in the settings, which means that if you run Windows in 85Hz and WinUAE in 60Hz, the 60Hz is fitted within the 85Hz range which obviously makes some frames not syncing like they should, maybe this is DirectX related, I don't know. Furthermore there is this PAL/NTSC issue... if something is run in PAL 60Hz mode using NTSC 59.8Hz (or whatever it is) also results in a frame being skipped eventually. So, yes, there is a lot of tweaking needed to be done, but when it is done correctly it at least in my cases never have behaved annoyingly.

[Legerdemain]

1) My Amiga doesn't _need_ any settings to be tweaked. It just runs fine all the time, whether it be graphics or games or whatever.
2) How many times have you been using a real Amiga when all of a sudden the screen goes black and some horribly friendly dialogue box for a completely different app comes up?
3) UAE is a pig to set up for full-screen displays of the right size and right aspect ratios. I like to be able to switch between 1280x1024x32 to AGA PAL 320x256 and still have everything look right _without_ twiddling settings.
4) I like playing around with odd hardware. Can't fit a Zorro III card in a Windows box.

Considering that it is more or less impossible to work around some of the issues above when talking about emulation under Windows. Some issues are so obvious that one simply has to accept them or just decide not to use the emulator just because one can't handle the obvious consequences.

I have yet to see WinUAE run as smoothly as my Amiga on any system (and I've seen some quite good systems). I know my Amiga was way more expensive (Cyberstorm PPC, 68060@50/604e@200, Voodoo III) but that's not the argument. WinUAE is good - but it's not thatgood.

I do see your point, but it's not like there isn't issues with real AMiGA:s either. I've tried to come up with a good solution on switching between RTG/AGA in a smooth way on my A1200. Bought myself a flickerfixer/scandoubler and thought that was nice... until I realised I had to get a monitorswitch aswell, and then suddenly the quality of the signal will be somewhat less unless some big money is spent.  And even after a monitorswitch is bought, there will be some delays when switching the screens and the AGA frequencies are still rather low so that some monitors don't support them and so on, and so on. I've yet no had this really pleasant experience with handling AGA/RTG on the same screen on a real AMiGA, and in some cases WinUAE does that better.

In the end, what it all comes down to is how one wants to use the AMiGA. In some cases I prefer WinUAE, in some cases i prefer the real thing. They both have advantages.