A500 emulator for the Nintendo DS

[stefcep2]

Recently I set up a Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulator for the Nintendo DS.  Its still a WIP but runs a lot of games and even has to be slowed down because it runs them too fast.  Given that the Genesis and the A500 both have a 68000 CPU I wondered why no-one has yet tried to do an A500 emulator for the Amiga, OCS would be fine. Any programmers out there?

[madsjm]

I think emulating the A500 is much more difficult and demanding than emulating the Megadrive.
I am running both on my PSP. While the Megadrive emu is fast, UAE is quite slow at times.

[darksun9210]

where as the chippery in the sega was fairly simple, the custom hardware of the amiga is more difficult to emulate... i'll be surprised (and rather happy) if an amiga emulator on the DS is little more than a slideshow...

[arion]

i think there is an amiga emulator for the gp2x not sure if it is any good though.

[ZeBeeDee]

arion wrote:
i think there is an amiga emulator for the gp2x not sure if it is any good though.

Quote from the wiki at pocketheaven.com

"Fairly slow, but playable. Uae4all is a GP2X Amiga emulator. Currently with bugs, but quite a few games are playable and the emulator is being worked on.

Supports A500, A500+ and A600 based games."

[Velcro_SP]

The DS has two screens, one being touch-sensitive, of 256 x 192 pixels. Classic Amiga Workbench was "hi-res" at 640 x 200 NTSC (640 x 256 PAL). I dunno how you would do the emulation, scale everything down on the fly? Classic arcade games were "low-res" at 320 x 200 NTSC (320 x 256 PAL) so I don't see that you could do those either. Also, the DS can do some nice things but I dunno if it has the horsepower to emulate a classic Amiga in a usable way.

[stefcep2]

The different screen size is also an issue with the genesis emulator and they get around it by 1. scaling down the vertical size and 2 making the screen scroll horizontally when your character reaches one horizontal end of the screen to show what's too big to fit.  It actually is quite good, but sometimes a game is more playable if you turn the vertical scaling off

i am currently playing sensible soccer, speedball, sonic 1,2,3, f1 championship, pacmania, aladdin, shane warne's cricket: other than sonic, these were all A500 games and they actually have to be slowed down, so there' still a few cpu cycles left over.

i was  thinking an A500 emulator that only played games, no workbench, but I suspected the custom graphics and sound chips on the Amiga might be too intensive.  I'd love to be able to play the 2D alien breed series on DS.  Interestingly the genesis emulator was written in Java first and now is in   C so if it were done in assembler it ought to leave more cpu power for emulating the OCS chipset on the A500

if anyone is interested jEnesis DS is here: http://rapidshare.de/files/39986082/jEnesisDS_0.7.4.zip.html

You have to play around with some of the emulation configs by touching the joypad icon after starting a game to get some games working properly