To Coldfish :
At present, I can't test WinUAE on a TV or video monitor, as I need to move my PC for that purpose. But I know WinUAE alone won't be able to solve the problem, as no other emulator I tested on my TV, including CCS64 which is an almost perfect emulator and doesn't even need as much as my PC's 500 MHz, can't solve it either. That's the main reason why to date no emulator can replace my Commodore 64 either.
So for the moment I am testing WinUAE on my 60 Hz LCD monitor. To this end I use the least CPU-demanding Amiga configuration possible : 68000, KS 1.3, OCS, no sound, no hard drive, etc., starting from the default settings of my freshly installed WinUAE, the latest version. "Drive speed" therefore is definitely "100%", and CPU is on "match A500 speed". What you call "frameskipping" (I suppose it is the "refresh" option) can't be changed, for whatever reason. As it is not intended to re-scale the frame rate, I doubt it would help anyway. I use two disks : a WB 1.3 disk in order to test the mouse pointer, and the demo "Deadly Jammin II" in order to test some scrollings that are perfect on a real A500, mainly a simple text scrolling.
I have now tried every possible option in order to improve the quality, but not one changes anything. The animations remain awful, like on any other emulator I have seen. As far as a scrolling is concerned, the problem caused by the refresh rate difference is obvious, and WinUAE behaves here like CCS64 on the same screen frequencies : scrollings are rough and make regular jumps. Speeding up WinUAE to 60 fps in order to make it match the monitor frequency doesn't change anything, but it seems that this option has no effect if the frame rate is increased beyond the normal rate (50 fps). When it comes to the mouse pointer, it seems to me that it isn't only a matter of gap between frequencies : the pointer is moved like Windows' mouse pointer, as if it was drawn pixel per pixel instead of being moved as a whole graphic sprite. For example, as in Windows until W98, you can see several mouse pointers at the same time during motion. By the way, 2000 or XP's mouse pointer moves slightly better, but still much worse than a real Amiga pointer on a native Agnus or Alice screen mode.
The only WinUAE setting that might have a chance to change something is the "Vertical sync" function in the Display menu, provided (according to the docs) that the screen mode is changed to a real 50 or 100 Hz. Here it doesn't change anything, but I can't switch my LCD to 100 Mhz, and according to the docs this option needs a fast PC. But in order to be effective, this option would have to change the 50.12 fps into an exact 50 fps, because a 100 Hz screen is exactly 100 and not 2 x 50.12 Hz ; I kind of made sure of that using CCS64 on my previous CRT monitor, whose 100 Hz modes provided the best animation (although still jumping).
I guess an earlier version of WinUAE would not help, since at least it would be necessary to bring the emulation to the same rate as the screen refresh rate. Anyway the last WinUAE version I tested (on another Pentium 3) was earlier than 1.0. I also tested the "Fellow" emulator, which brings the same results.
What's the model of your graphic card ? As Leirbag28 confirms, maybe only some cards are able to output a TV signal without that scrambling of the input's frame rate. Mine is a 1999 Guillemot Xentor 32, with nVidia TNT2 Ultra processor.
About your side note : you are right, but I don't use PC's at work, so I am pretty sure your hypothesis won't explain every situation ! There are even more people that binned their Amiga because they wanted that same PC they were used to work (and get bored) with.
To Leirbag28 :
Thank you ! I don't feel alone anymore either.
"The Mac users seemed to do fine most of the time" : how do you explain that ? Did these Mac use special TV outputs, or a standard graphic card's TV-Out ? If their outputs were the same as the PC's, then maybe the operating system is at stake. Or Mac users were able in some way to preview the video result.
To _ThEcRoW :
I guess EAB has nothing to do with Amiga.org. TjLazer was in fact referring to the Games download links, not another copyright policy.
