Amiga emulators: is it worth it?

[spirantho]

WinUAE is a very very good emulation. However, it's still an emulation.

The problem with emulating a computer is that there will always be latency. Usually this is most visible in sound. This is because on the Amiga the sound output is wired straight from the sound chip to the audio out. On the virtual machine, the sound goes into the sound buffer which is constantly playing out of the audio socket, but it must always go out of a buffer, as this is how sound cards work. The larger the buffer the smoother the sound, but the higher the latency.

You'll never get the complete Amiga look and feel via emulation, no matter how good UAE is.

Get a SAM 440 but get an A500 or A1200 too for old games! They're hardly expensive... (compared to the Sam!)

[spirantho]

As is always the way, different people have different requirements.

For myself, I use UAE because it's a very good program. However, it is not and never will be perfect.

There is a latency in the UAE engine, there has to be - it's fundamental to the way it works. And for myself the combined latency of the sound, the graphics, and the input maybe be almost imperceptible, but I still feel the difference, and that's what's most important to me.

I'm lucky in as much as I have both a powerful WinUAE setup and also a beefed-up A4000 (CSPPC 060), but I can tell you I only really enjoy using one of them, even though they're both controlled by the same mouse/keyboard/monitor, and it's not the UAE.