Falling down the stairs is quicker and simpler than going to the moon, in both instances you have a brief period of weightlessness, get knocked around by powerful forces and see stars on the way, but one's an achievement and one isn't. May as well say that about minimig too, a fine insult to the pioneers.
I get your point in reminding me of that, but really, it does nothing to advance the state of the art. 68K or PPC code running emulated on an x86-64 isn't gonna be as fast as x86-64 native code. A dual core x86-64 running with hardware enhanced pre-emptive multitasking might despite losing 5% to the virtual CPU code, be able to be significantly faster in some tasks than a dual core x86-64 running the same tasks on linux or vista. A new Amiga hardware platform might seek to be able to do realtime effects, mixing and processing at high HDTV resolutions up to cinematic quality. It's got the genetics for the job, the amount of raw x86 power required to do with x86 code what an A4000 could do with video is quite disparate, i.e. needing around 500Mhz machines, now emulating the capabilities of the A4000 with 68k code running over the top of x86 would need fairly high end x86 single cores, say 2Ghz PR. 2Ghz systems struggle to play high HDTV resolutions. However, if we were to take a dual 2Ghz PR equivalent core and enable it with an amiga derived philosophy of hardware multitasking, it might well do things that it will take 20Ghz PR technology to do on a single machine in realtime. To take Amiga to that level of performance under UAE emulation with 68K code would seem to require approx 400Ghz of equivalent PR.
Anyhoo, if you just wanna play old games, UAE would be sufficient of course. If we wanna see the kind of lead in gaming and graphics the Amiga used to have over conventional x86 architecture and M$ OSes again, then advancing the hardware is required.
