AGA Question

[Piru]

That "Soft AGA" is a joke, in case someone didn't get it. The only way to emulate AGA is thru UAE.

[Piru]

Sorry to bring up this old thread again.

I'm sure it is not impossible for somebody to create some sort of AGA emulation for ECS machines with say an RTG and a powerful processor like a 50Mhz '030 or an '040.

It's not.

Maybe it could be in the form of a hacked WhdLoad or some sort of patcher program.

No and no.

RTG cards are much much faster then AGA and offer up to 16.7 million colors at much higher resolutions as opposed to the 256 colors that AGA can offer. That coupled with a decent CPU and some fastram and i can't see why it would be doable.

Nope. 68k, even 68060@100 is way too slow (assuming you'd want to reach A1200 performance).

Amiga RTG cards (even Radeon with PCI) aren't much faster than native AGA anyway. The bus solutions are very slow.

Its a bummer having an RTG with its fast blitter (super fast compared to AGA), much more colors and higher resolutions but then being limited to ECS games & demos.

Look at SimCity 2000 as an example. The Amiga version will run on an unexpanded A1200 with 2MB chipram but it won't run on say an A3000 with a 68060 processor and Picasso IV.

The chipset emulation is easily the most CPU demanding part of the UAE emulation. Emulating the CPU is trivial task in comparison.

So no, m68k can't do it. Not anywhere near full speed at least.

You can see this easily by trying to run UAE (and enabling A1200 kind of configuration) on OCS/ECS machine with a graphics card. It will crawl. It's nowhere near usable speed.

[Piru]

@Piru

I guess that puts the myth to rest then. The only way for AGA is with a 1200/4000/CD32 or Winuae.

Well, technically you can run UAE with AGA configuration on OCS/ECS amiga. It's just too slow to be really usable.

The closest would probably be A3000 + CS PPC 233 + CyberVisionPPC, running PowerUP MorphOS and PPC native UAE. My guess would be that it'd still struggle to reach usable speeds... and of course it wouldn't be 68k anymore.

[Piru]

Better idea would be add virtual layer for 68k amigas, so that every nodos game could run in vga screen.

Something like VMware for 68k amigas, migh have performance problems but.. it would be faster than UEA for 68k

Can you give us any technical explanation as to how this would work then?

If not, this is just hot air and wishful thinking.

[Piru]

Some kind of virtual layer that just forward requests.

It is not possible, you cannot "just forward requests". In order to get AGA features you need to implement full display chipset emulation (the slowest part of the whole emulation stack anyway). This is so slow that it is unimaginable to get it perform in any sensible way on a 68k.