downix wrote:
mdwh2 wrote:
AndrewBell wrote:
Even if it isn't demanded, you can run OS4 on AGA. Besides that, look at the bigger picture. Clone-A and Minimig, if available on PCI cards, offer Amiga graphics facilities to modern, fast CPUs. They still have features that are not present on modern 3D accelerated gfx cards, such as sprites, collision detection, playfields, hardware scrolling etc. Jens has even talked about extending the capabilities of the chipset.
Surely all of these things can be reproduced on modern hardware? Sprites can be done in hardware, certainly. Scrolling can be done with texture mapping, and would be at least as fast as the Amiga's hardware scrolling, surely.
if you brute force it, maybe. But remember, it takes a multi-Ghz CPU to emulate a cycle-inaccurate version of the chipset as/is. To make it a true clone, you'd be pushing multiple multi-core CPU's just to handle the chipset.
The Amiga's blitter alone is incredibly difficult to copy in simulation. It's design is more akin to an ancient Crey than it is to traditional hardware, resulting in a huge overhead to make it accurate. When you look at the cost, a pair of $1400 CPU's or a $35 FPGA... which is the cost efficient method?
It's difficult to reproduce the exact same behaviour (as UAE shows), so sure, if you want to run Amiga games, an FPGA may be better than emulating on standard hardware.
But I was talking about whether modern hardware have these same features. By saying "Minimig, if available on PCI cards, offer Amiga graphics facilities to modern, fast CPUs. They still have features that are not present on modern 3D accelerated gfx cards", I was reading that as suggesting this would offer something to PC users? Or did he just mean in the context of running old Amiga games?
