WinFellow project looking for beta testers

[System]

As some people already noticed, there has recently been activity on the WinFellow SourceForge project homepage (read: "WinFellow is NOT dead" ).

It has indeed been a long time since our last release, you might say we took a break of some sorts, but part of the team started to actively develop WinFellow again. We have had several bug fixes and improvements, as well as some experimental new features flowing into WinFellow.

A first call for feedback to our former beta testers didn't give too much response (many old email addresses refused to work), so I'm asking people interested in taking their part in actively helping to develop and improve WinFellow's stability and release quality to contact me. We would like to do a new release, but we'd rather have it tested properly. If you used to belong to our beta team but didn't receive any updates from me, just contact me with your new email address.

We're currently maintaining two versions of WinFellow (two separate CVS branches), one for the unmodified assembler version, one version where portions of the code have been ported to C. If you're interested in testing and comparing these, taking these apart, and consider your technical knowledge good enough to file a bug report (it's really not that hard), I'd be glad to hear from you.

We can use every help we can get in finding bugs in the existing parts of WinFellow as well as testing those two different versions. Just be aware that WinFellow is under constant development and problems are likely to be encountered.

If you're interested, don't hesitate to mail me under carfesh@gmx.net and after collecting some information I'll let the admin of the EAB set you up as a member of the beta forum which we're going to use to coordinate tests and distribute beta releases. We also have a mailing list at SourceForge that can and will be used for eMail contact. The information asked is solely on your hardware configuration (like processor, graphics card, memory, sound card, etc.) - we need this information to be able to notice and isolate problems related to used hardware.

[whabang]

I always liked Fellow. Too bad it ain't go the RTG-drivers that UAE has...

[StevenJGore]

Too bad it ain't got MOST of the things that UAE has!

Is there really any need for a second emulator? WinUAE would be the constant comparison for WinFellow, so why doesn't the Amiga community just concentrate on WinUAE?

Steve.

[Trezzer]

@steve:
Because it's nice to have a choice?

WinUAE/uae is an Amiga emulator with The Works(TM). Some might not have high-powered hardware to run it and get more out of Fellow for emulating games/demos exclusively (which AFAIR was the original target for Fellow).

[Jose]

Because it still has some advantages? I don't use emulators normally so don't remember but there were some. Winfellow was faster if I remember correctly...

[davey]

Considering the original fellow played A500 games very well on a p133 32mb ram, I would say that it had a place on the emulation scene. I read that the original could be used on as little as a 486 too.

Having a simple setup, as others said, only adds to it's relevance.

Fellow was the first emulator I used on a windows machine and it was primarily for the above reasons. I use AmigaForever(commerical distro of uae) now, and that is only because of the CD version booting the machine from cold using linux, otherwise it would be the free version uae+amigainabox

[redrumloa]

Is there really any need for a second emulator?

Sure, why not! As others have mentioned, Fellow targetting game compatability. Historically UAE always had sound/and or timing issues with games, while fellow seemed to run them perfectly and worked on much slower systems.

[DeQuevedo]

Hi All

Since fellow is open source and its mainly focused to games and demos, would be a great idea to try integrate it on MorphOS ans AmigaOs4.

This way you can have the appz running very well through the JIT and launch games and demos "directly" without having to launch the current UAE port every time.... would be somewhat like still having the customchipset downhere :-)

Have Fun

[Piru]

Since fellow is open source and its mainly focused to games and demos, would be a great idea to try integrate it on MorphOS ans AmigaOs4.

Fellow is in large parts x86 asm.