How is MAME on the Amiga

[Hyperspeed]

MAME is rubbish on 68k. Probably on Amiga in general.

My favourite emulators are AmiMasterGear, CoolNES and AmiGameBoy.
Fusion and Shapeshifter are cool too and allow for productive
emulation.

I could never find 128k games for ASp but I know Speculator was pretty
good. Auf Wiedersehen Monty on Magic64 was fun as well.

:-D

[ikir]

AmigaOS4 and MorphOS versione are ok :-)

Played all Metal Slug 1 & 2 some months ago :-)

[CU_AMiGA]

I keep seeing the emulator CoolNES propping up. Is this actually any cop? I have a played a coupld of NES emus for Amiga, and they are all avarage cos they suffer from graphical glitches (please don't be affended, i am grateful of time spent). I rate ASp as the best emu on Amiga. It runs very fast (on good spec machines) and multitasks.

Regards,

[Hyperspeed]

You've probably just heard me chanting about it...

;-) ;-) :-D

It's got some serious graphical glitches and slowdown in some areas
compared to the sublime AmiMasterGear but who can deny that Mario 3 on
Amiga isn't cool.

Forget Giana sisters, get a Mario3.nes and give it a try, it kept me
playing right until the snow level which must mean it's of a
reasonable quality to warrant a visit to Aminet!

AmiGameBoy is also a good one, programmed by the same person who did
AmiMasterGear. Both are Z80 machines so I suppose if you get it right
with one then the other follows.

I reccomend Kirby, Tetris and BombJack!

;-)

[CU_AMiGA]

Hello,

I tried CoolNESs. Sorry, it is pretty bad. The speed is the only defense. But the disapointment turned into joy, when i tried the DarkNESs emulator (68k version, although the PPC is very good as well). Boy now that is an emulator, okay it is a little slow, and the sound (but full speed with FS2) is iffy, but the games runs almost perfectly. Please some, update this emulator! I am going to try and badger the dude to update or at least release the source code, bearing in mind to update for 68k NOT AOS4! :-)


Oh, speaking of source code, i am also going to try and contact (again) the MagiC64 author and persuade (or buy out) the source code for his wonderful C64 emulator. I contacted the guy before via email (when i was after the, unregistered version) and i got through to him eventually. And he gave me the key file like a shot, he wasn't bothered. Which from one angle is good, but from another is very bad. So i am gonna try and get in touch with him again and get that source code.

Meanwhile, i have compile a list of best emulators for Amiga 68k (in order of best):

Gameboy:

Wzonka Lad - Very excellent emu. Runs lots of GB mono games with decent enough sound. Requires a decent setup (060) to make full use of this emulator. Seems to have way more features than AmiGamboy. Has excellent GUI for easy to use access.

AmiGameboy - A good GB mono emulator. Fast on 030 and full speed certainly on 060. Has very good sound, but can suffer from graphic glitches. Which is why Wzonka Lad is the better of the two. In it's defense, it probably has a better GUI than Wzonka Lad.

GNUBoy - A Gamboy Color emulator. This bloody emulaotr doesn't seem to run on my setup. Shame, i would like very much to see this working. It requires MUI, but i have installed this and still nothing happens. Can anyone eplain?


Master System / Game Gear:

AmiMasterGear - One of the better emulators for Amiga. Execellent speed on 030 and garenteed full speed on 060. Has lots of features to make emulation better/faster depending on setup. Excellent GUI, very easy to use. This is the Master System emulator to get on Amiga, except no imitations! :-) Awesome.

MasterGear - This 68k version is slow and is bugged with graphics glitches. If you have 030,040,060 AGA, don't even bother with this, go for AmiMasterGear. Which requires less power/RAM and runs games much faster. This emulator runs slow, even on my 060.

ZX Spectrum:

ASp - Probably the best emulator on Amiga ever. This can emulate a ZX Spectrum 128k (including AY Sound) fully with an 060 setup. Has very awesome features such as snapshots, an easy to use GUI. This emulator has tons of features to suit any Amiga setup (display mode, sound, etc). Can also achieve decent ZX Spectrum speed on 030,040. Can be made to run on any decent Amiga setup. I should know, as i was a former beta tester when i had my Blizzardvision setup :-)

X128 - A decent emulator. Has tons of features, but is let down by GUI. I also have yet to get my CD32 Pads working with this emulator. X128 is not quite as fast as ASp, but is faster at loading multi .tap files, and has a little better compataiblity. Can also emulate more ZX Spectrum models. Has good speed under 030, but 060 is really necessary to get the full use out of it.

ZXLive - Have not tried this one yet. But heard it is pretty good, if a little limited. A good start.

MSX:

AmiMSX - This is the emu that started the AmiEmulators boulder going. This is a very excellent MSX emulator. Tons of features (to suit MSX games configurations), a brillaint GUI, easy to use. This emulator achieves good speeds on 030, and full speed on 060. Compatibility, is excellent and speeds and graphics is better than fMSX (fMSX suffers than speeds being too fast, as well as graphics glitches). This is how all emulators should be done! :-)

fMSX - This too is a good emulator of the MSX. Has features of the AmiMSX emualtor to make certain games work under MSX confirgurations. This emalator achieves full speed on 060 (special version) and good speeds on 030. But will need 060 to get the most out of it. The thing lacking this emulator is certain games have graphics glitches, and speed problems. But fMSX should remain choice for graphics card / PPC owners, as AmiMSX cannot work with that hardware. This emulator is very flexible and has tons of screen modes, and AHI setups allowed. So this is a good second choice if using AmiMSX is not possible.

NES:

DarkNESs (68k) - A very good emulator. The mappers that are emulated, are emulated very well. But this results in speed loss. Therefore, i cannot recommend anyone with less than 060 to try this. But if you wan't to play the Super Mario games as they should, then try this! The sound on this emulator is not great but passible. The one other thing that lacks on this emulator is joypad/joystick support. Pity.

A/NES (68k) - An okay emalator. Runs very well on 030, and full speed on 060. But can only recommend simple NES games (like Tennis), to get any enjoyment out of this emulator, Super Mario can work, but suffers from the graphic glitches. In the defense of this emulator, it has tons of features, and joypad/joystick support. Something that lets dowm DarkNESs.

CoolNESs - This emulator is also okay. Achieves similar speeds to A/NES, but also suffers from the same (if a bit worse) graphic glitches they sacrificed, to gain speed. Has similar features to A/NES.

Commodore 64

MagiC64 - A very good and thorough emulator for Amiga. Runs very well from 030 and upwards, and also graphic cards. But not full speed, even at that. This emulator has many features and supports more file formats than Frodo. SID sound is supported as long as you have the required library file. But be warned, SID sound slows down emulation a lot (unless you have the hardware).

Frodo (68k v2.4) - This emualtor requires a very beefy Amiga, and can work well on an 060 setup if configured properly. But i wouldn't recommend anything less than 060, as this emulator is way slower than MagiC64. This emulator has a fair number of features, but not as many file formats supported as MagiC64. Has the SID sound support just like MagiC64. Just like fMSX, this emulator is recommened to graphic card owners, as this emulator is also very flexible with lots of screenmodes supported. A pretty decent emulator on the whole, recommended to graphic card owners. But MagiC64 recommended to 040 or lower owners.

Plus/4

Flamingo - An excellent Plus/4 emulator. Can get full speed on 060 and good speeds on 030. This emulator has lot of decent features and has very good compatibility with games. The emulation of the games itself is very good. Another very flexible emualtor, that can work on any setup, and achieve good speeds on any decent setup as well. Hint: Try out POD, a very good game! :-)

A4 - I have not tried this emulator, but seem to be the nearest rival to Flamingo. I heard that it was not what is was cracked up to be. (aka slow and emualtion problems).Use Flamingo instead.

MAME

MAME060 - This emulator is good for the early Arcade games such as PacMan, but don't expect anything else. Has features like sound and Joypad/Joystick support. This emulator is flexible, and can work on any setup, thanks to the screenmodes and AHI modes. But i wouldn't recommend anyone with less than 060/PPC, to get anything running at decent speed.


And that is the list. Hope it helps. This list needs to be updated probably though. Enjoy! :-)

Regards,

[dmac721]

    I could never get mame to work at all on my os3.5 machine. Came with a cucd.

[Cyberus]

A very informative post, CU_AMiGA

[CU_AMiGA]

Cyberus wrote:
A very informative post, CU_AMiGA

Thank you.

Anyhow. I have updated information. Concerning Commodore 64 SID emulation:

There are 2 SID emulation library files:

playsid.library - Good in terms of quality but bad in terms of speed. playsid.library can be found in the PlaySID package.

6581sid.library - Has okay quality (not as goog as playsid), but has much more speed than playsid. 6581sid.library can be found in the A64 package.

Hunt for these files on Aminet.


Note: I could cover the emulators on AmigaPPC, but considering i no longer have the hardware for them, it has no interest to me! :-)


Regards,

[mr_a500]

CU_AMiGA: You forgot to put the Atari800 emulator in your wonderous list. You mentioned it earlier, but I was wondering about the details.

I tried many times to get the Atari800 emulator working, but it always crashed for me. I wish I could get it working. I had more luck running xf25 (PC Atari 800 emulator) in PC-Task, but running an emulation inside an emulation is sloooooooww. (especially on an A500)

[DanDude]

Last time I played MAME on my A4000T was with the PPC version.  AGA is slow compared to my CybervisionPPC card.  060 version made it worse.  The GUI is awesome plus additional features to adjust audio...

Unfortunately you can run on PPC the 1MHz games, like Pac-Man, Pengo, Robotron 2084, Defender, Stargate, Blaster (actually Williams you can get away since graphics use bitmap only while others emulate screens like the C64).  Vector games like Asteroids, Tempest, Omega Race, Zektor, Star Trek you will have to adjust the video settings to make them work real-time.

Ya know, MAME could work a hell-of-a-lot-better on OS4 /\/\/\ Coders-->(hint) (hint) :-D

Now that I'm inching to play again, I may try the WES version and see what happens.

[drHirudo]

The Atari800 emulator works both on my Amiga1200 and my A4000, but it's slow (030 on the A1200 and 040 on the A4000) and I mostly use it for a slideshow of some Atari games. Here is addendum to the list of the great Amiga emulators:

Apple2000e - emulates almost perfectly the original AppleII+ and the latest version adds some AppleIIe functionality - mostly the extended memory, but lacks the 80column text mode, double highres and double lowres graphics modes. Still very compatible and fast - achieves original speed even on 28MHz 68020 Amigas. The Ludicrous speed option is really fun to watch on 68060 powered Amiga. Almost 98% compatible (a little part of the programs/games doesn't work). Unfortunatly it supports only the standart .dsk images, and the protected games as .nib wouldn't work.

CP4 - Commodore Plus 4 emulator with decent speed (have automatic frameskip option) with many chunkytoplanar drivers for achieving best perforamnce. Supports D64 and real 1541 diskdrives as well (provided you have the interface). Comes with freeware MakeROM utility which creates os96 ROM image for easier/faster install.

AmiTRS - TRS80 (or TRaSh80) emulator - it's relatively fast, but provided that it emulates Z80 powered monochrome computer, that's no surprice. It have many original textadventures and some graphics games as well, but most of them are rubbish. I have about 60MB (zip archived) worth of software for it, but probably woudn't have the time to see even 10% of it.

For the Amstrad there are Ami-CPC and EmuCPC which are worth a try, although the compatibility is low. Many great games are available for the Amstrad (some classic games have better versions on the Amstrad than on the Commodore 64). Big deal of software titles are available at NVG's FTP site. Plus the Amstrad have 80 column mode which is usefull for some old productivity software.

AmOric - Oric Atmos emulator - the Oric Atmos is a little known machine (mostly in France and UK) although it sold more than the Vic-20. The latest update to this emulator is from 1996, and it have some bugs causing freeze of the AmigaOS when exiting and stop of loading for improper tap images. Still it can be used for playing most of the games available on tapes. It lack emulation of disk drives and the hybrid half-TEXT half-HIRES mode (used in the games Doggy, Fire Flash etc..) for speed purposes. For more info and software for the Oric point your browser to Oric.org

Electrostatic - this is not an emulator in the way the other emulators work. It's a static binary translator - it takes the Atari2600 ROM image (only 2K and 4K ROMs work) and will recompile it in Amiga Executable, making the resulted game relatively fast. Unfortunatelly not much of the newest Atari2600 games work, but still I had success with Vault Assault, Skeleton, Warring Worms, Some Demos and Secret Agent.

Vic-Emu - Vic-20 emulator - not much games work on it, also a little fast on my config, but still worth a try. Doesn't emulate the disk drives. The Vic-Emu-tools come handy as an addition to the Vic-Emu.

MySNES - SNES emulator for 68K Amigas - this is 16 bit system, and unfortuantelly the result is very slow emulator without sound. I have only tried the Zophar Birthday demo on it and it worked.

AmiGenerator68K - Sega Genesis (Mega Drive emulator) - rather than taking the Fusion and Shapeshifter approach of emulating the 68K processor, it emulates it by software, thus very slow. Taking the game Splatter House 3 on my config to the title screen took minutes.

QDOS4Amiga - Sinclair QL emulator (or more likely a whole OS, since it takes over the machine and reboots) - the QL is a little known 68008 powered machine - actually probably the first publically available computer with multitasking OS (QDOS) - released in 1984. Not much software is available for this computer, and most of it are pretty hard to find anyway. The emulator reads/writes QL nativa 3 1/2 inch diskettes and runs most of the software (assuming it's 680x0 compatible - some of it needs patches).

ECPM and SimCPM - these are emulators for the old multiplatform CP/M operating system - very primitive, but still nice to look at for nostalgic reasons - like running WordStar

DREaM - emulator of the Dragon 32 computer (6809 powered computer - the 6809 is the 8 bit little brother of the 68000). Compatibility is good, it's fast, have 2 versions - with copperlists for speed and slower system friendly version. Have the ability to save snapshots (also called savestates, for later gaming).

ABeeb - BBC micro emulator - I don't have much experience with this emulator except running some games on it.

AmiPCEngine - PCEngine emulator written by the AmiMasterGear author - it's not much compatible - only some of the demos which I tried actually worked.

ArcEm - Arcade Emulator for the Space Invaders + derivatives games - work good even on slow Amigas.

And some more.

[CU_AMiGA]

Hello,

Hey, thats a good list as well. Thanks for the addition. I found the link to DREaM:

DREaM v1.02

There is also the description of the emulator here:

DREaM Description

Actually, i am also looking out for fMSX version 2.3b2, just to experiment. If anyone can find this, then it will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

[Hyperspeed]

I'm not sure I'd appreciate the games on drhirudo's emulator list. I
mostly like the late 80's console stuff.

In defence of CoolNES - it supports excellent sound, fantastic GUI,
CD32 pad support and Mario3 (although mildly glitchy) is playable
enough to keep you at it for a few hours.

Mario3 has to be the most playable game on an 8-Bit...  although due
to the glitching the bonus rounds become unusable.

I think AmiGameBoy is better than WZonkaLad because, like
AmiMasterGear, it has perfect sound, CD32 pad support, full speed and
if a game follows the rules it will not glitch. Sadly - Mario doesn't
work on it, although Tetris and Kirby are fantastic - as is Bomberman
et al.

On a more sophisticated note, has anyone got anything like Duke Nukem
or Marathon running on Shapeshifter or Fusion? What was FusionPPC like
as I'm itching to play Command & Conquer on Amiga!

:-D

[magnetic]

The Morphos version of MAME is up to date and VERY FAST! Plays almost every game out there at full screen full framerate on my PEg2 g4

magnetic

@HYPERSPEED

We have a copy Brand New of Fusion PPC $49.95 shipped!

www.magneticsystemsnsyc.com

[CU_AMiGA]

Hi

I tried both Apple2000e and DREaM, and both worked very well on my setup and at great speeds. Brilliant emus!

In defence of CoolNES - it supports excellent sound, fantastic GUI,CD32 pad support and Mario3 (although mildly glitchy) is playable enough to keep you at it for a few hours.

Mario3 has to be the most playable game on an 8-Bit...  although due to the glitching the bonus rounds become unusable.

To be honest. I couldn't play the game on that emu. It was far too glitchy to be playable. It runs really well on DarkNESs though, but can be a little slow at times, even on 060.

I think AmiGameBoy is better than WZonkaLad because, like
AmiMasterGear, it has perfect sound, CD32 pad support, full speed and if a game follows the rules it will not glitch. Sadly - Mario doesn't work on it, although Tetris and Kirby are fantastic - as is Bomberman et al.

Yes, AmiGameBoy DOES have better sound than WzonkaLad. but WzonkaLad also has all the features you meantioned above, and has more compatibility. Also, i managed to get Mario 1 and 2 working under AmiGameboy, although they can get glitchy (on puase screen for example).

On a more sophisticated note, has anyone got anything like Duke Nukem or Marathon running on Shapeshifter or Fusion? What was FusionPPC like as I'm itching to play Command & Conquer on Amiga!

Yeah. I would also like to try that. I heard you can get Duke Nukem/Doom running great on Shapeshifter and Fusion. In fact, Sim City 2000 on the MAC is meant to run faster on Mac emu, than the Amiga version!!!!


I am also thinking about trying to get iNES, and a few other emulators that run on 680x0 to run on emu! For a laugh :-)

Regards,