Reasons why I don't like emulators - or why xx-UAE is really unusable

[Minuous]

>The Amiga keyboard has an extra key, the backslash/vertical bar key on the top right that is not present on standard layouts, but this key is still essential for programming.

That key isn't "extra", it has been on every keyboard I have seen in the last 25 years or so. So you bought a keyboard which is defective, as it is missing important keys, then blame the emulator for this!? And anyway this can be easily resolved by changing the keymap.

>VMWare has set the standards (Ctrl+Alt), so why the heck not simply use that. Or, at least, show the mapping how to ungrab as soon as the mouse is grabbed. This should be the minimum standard.

Ctrl+Tab works here for this. Titlebar also explains how to ungrab mouse.

>Provide proper documentation with all options explained, and documentation that is up to date. A man page is fine. A web page is fine. But please, provide it.

I agree, the UAE documentation is atrocious.

>This is here a (old, but not so old) 2.6Ghz Athlon. Yet, emulation speed is probably something in the ball-park of a 68030@25Mhz.

My host system is only 1.6GHz, but the emulation flies, much faster than any 68060 let alone 68030. Probably a configuration issue.

[Minuous]

The German Amiga keyboard has *one* extra key compared to a standard German PC keyboard, and that key is essential.  The backslash on a standard PC-keyboard is reachable by AltGr+Sharp-S

That sounds like a painful way to type such a commonly used key. Anyway, modern PC keyboards have many more keys than Amiga keyboards, so it's just a matter of assigning it to one of the spare keys. Which could be done in the host OS, the guest OS, or the emulator.

No, it doesn't. F12+g does this, and no, the title bar does not say this. Once again, I have no Wind** here, and I don't consider bying one just for the purpose of Amiga emulation. And once again, there are established choices for this, and Ctrl+Tab is not one of them, but anyhow....

Sorry, I meant Alt+Tab. Windows programs can be run under UNIX via WINE, no need to buy/pirate Windows. WinUAE is far advanced compared to other variants.

[Minuous]

>Wine, because there's nothing on Linux to run it?

I should have known not to recommend Wine, I get the impression that (a) you are strongly anti-emulation for no apparent reason and (b) completely partisan in terms of Linux vs. other OSes. If a decent version of UAE isn't available natively for Linux, perhaps someone from the Linux community should do something about that. It's open source after all.

>Or build a keymap myself because the emulator fails emulating the keyboard in a useful way? Please, excuse me, but such solutions are not exactly "usable". They might be "ok" as last resort, but they are far from ideal.

>Look, there are certain "minimum standards" I would recommend to follow. The minimum standard is that the keyboard works as expected (with the keys functioning as the labels on them say).

It does. Press the backslash key, you get a backslash. If you want Alt-ß to produce a backslash, you can set up a keymap, but to my knowledge that isn't a standard Amiga shortcut and never has been. It sounds like you want to clog UAE and/or AmigaOS up with quasi-standards from foreign platforms. You can't blame AmigaOS for expecting an Amiga keyboard to be present. Or UAE for assuming by default that you have a backslash key. I didn't even realize it until you pointed it out that there are defective keyboards available that are missing this key. I don't complain that there is no ß key on my keyboard.

>But if I have to pile certain emulation layers on top of each other to compile a program for an old system, then that's not a workable solution.

You don't have to. There's no need to cross compile, all development can be (and is, in my case) done under the guest OS.

[Minuous]

>No, I'm anti "non-working solutions". MS-Word under wine works perfectly. AmigaOs under UAE does not. Big difference.

I don't use Linux, so can't say from personal experience, but WinUAE under WINE seems to work fine for most people. (Eg. see http://www.pcguru.plus.com/uae_wine.html and http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=48622 ).

>But why should I run an emulator in an emulator?

Wine Is Not an Emulator, it just translates API calls. So there's no double-layer emulation to degrade performance. In fact as the second link I gave above points out, this is the fastest way.

>If linux wasn't important enough for the original author, why should this program be important enough for me?

Because it has more features and speed than the other versions of UAE. I agree, it would be nice if he supported more platforms (I was disappointed when Win98 support was dropped prematurely)...But no need to punish yourself by avoiding it just because of that.

>Very funny. There is no backslash key on a german keyboard. I believe I said this multiple times.

What I was replying to was your statement "The minimum standard is that the keyboard works as expected (with the keys functioning as the labels on them say).", and I simply pointed out that it does so.

>You can offer me workarounds, but these are workarounds and no solutions.

Your proposed solution IIRC was something along the lines of translating a host scancode into ASCII via the host OS, then translating that ASCII value into a guest scancode. Which would cause all kinds of issues and is about the least clean solution I can imagine.

>standard PC "shortcut", and thus, by all basics, it should work. There's nothing exotic or unusual about this.    The German keyboard is an ISO-standard, not a quasi-standard, and if I run an emulator on a PC, it should understand the standard PC keyboard I'm typing on.

No, it shouldn't. Eg. with Caps Lock on, typing Shift-A on a PC gives lowercase a (on DOS and Windows at least, not sure about Linux), whereas on an Amiga it gives uppercase A. The correct behaviour when you type this into an Amiga emulator would be to handle it like an Amiga does. There are a whole list of standard PC shortcuts, none of them get translated by any Amiga emulator. Eg. Alt-numpad to emit a specific ASCII character, Ctrl-X to cut, Alt-F,X for quit, etc.
  Surely it's best to be handled at the scancode level, not the ASCII value level...Not all keys even have ASCII values, the same ASCII value can be generated by different keys, etc. Injecting fake keystrokes or suppressing real ones is going to play havoc with Amiga software that isn't expecting this. Also, it's probably not a good idea to make the emulator send different scancodes just because of host locale settings.
  Also, whether or not ISO has endorsed it, it's not a platform-neutral or even OS-neutral standard, as there are Windows keys on it...

>And the rule should be that every key you have on the emulated platform must be reachable from the emulator. The request I have is *really that simple*.

Well, IIRC there's no way to type the two "international keys" (as present on some Amiga keyboards) on a standard PC keyboard, as they aren't present. (So probably every Amiga emulator fails this test.) Some kind of remapping is thus needed in any event; it shouldn't be too hard to assign a key for Backslash at the same time.

>Sigh. How do I compile a library then? SAS/C is not available under Linux. In other words, it requires quite an amount of porting the sources to make this happen. Maybe you have the time to do that, but I don't. I just want to compile and bugfix what I have, and do not have enough spare time to invest to port from one tool chain to a completely different tool chain.

It seems I have been misunderstood, sorry if my original answer was not clear. One runs the compiler, SAS/C in this case, from within the emulator. (AFAIK SAS/C is still closed source so it wouldn't be feasible to port it to another platform anyway.) Text editing of the source code can be done from the host or the guest, it doesn't make much difference.

[Minuous]

>It's still the wrong solution for the problem, it's an emulation of Windows API on Linux. What for? Write portable programs in first place.

So, by logical extension, every program ever written should be ported to every platform, so we wouldn't need emulators? That's not an efficient solution to the problem of cross-platform compatibility. Toni Wilen is busy improving WinUAE. It already has a proper Windows GUI. Making a proper Linux GUI for it would be a lot of work. Or the alternative, replacing it with an SDL GUI, would be not only a lot of work but also a downgrade. I'd rather he continued to improve the emulation.

>My stuff runs on Windows, Linux, AIX, IRIX, Solaris and probably a couple of other Os'es. Too lazy?

It's not that portable if it doesn't run on the Amiga, of course. Too lazy? ;-)

>There's no usable emulator for my platform and my application, that's what I'm claiming, no more no less.

Seems a rather pointless thread: I don't think there are many Linux programmers here that will write a new Amiga emulator for you. (You might have luck filing a bug report though with the coders of existing Linux UAE versions.) FS-UAE has some issues that mean you aren't going to use it, I think everyone understands already. Either that or it's just another anti-emulation rant. I don't get the hate that emulation gets, no one starts topics like "I hate word processors"... I also don't understand why you would write/port one if you hate them.

>For example, get the SDL documentation for starters - that's a nice portable multimedia abstraction library that is very workable.

SDL is awful, it's just a common-denominator approach that totally ignores the conventions of the host OS. Properly ported software should be properly adapted to eg. the prevailing GUI look and feel of what it's running on. For an example, compare my AmiArcadia and WinArcadia emulators.

>No, the level a key has to be handled depends on the key..."Reasonable remapping" is exactly the purpose of the emulator.

There's various philosophies about how to do remapping, eg. some emus have an option for positional mapping vs. keyname mapping. Neither is unreasonable, as they each have pros and cons depending on what guest program you are running. Hence why it is often provided as a user preference.

>(and yes, you can download sources).

Is http://www.thomas-richter.de your site?