Amiga emulation combination for Macbook

[skilgannon]

Afternoon all.

I'm a long term user of Amiga Forever and love it.  However I no longer have a PC and have gone Mac / Amiga only lol.

My Mac is the MacBook Alluminium 2.4ghz Intel one and I'm not wanting to Boot Camp it so was wondering what you all think the best mix of emulation software would be to run on the Mac?  I'm using Snow Leapord.  

I don't think there is anything as sweet as Amiga Forever for the Mac but whatever recommendation you make - I will give it a go.

Thaaaaanks

John

[Crom00]

I have a macbook unibody 15" late 2008. I USE XP with Parallels instead of bootcamp. In coherence mode the XP desktop integrates with the mac desktop and you can run Amiga forever as if it was a Mac ap. I use this all the time with real powerfull apps like Catia, 3dsMAx, Lightwave, and Photoshop. Recommend 4 gigs of ram 2 at the very least.

Amiga Forever doesn't have an equivalent on the mac.

One other note, AROS live works with Parallels very easy to use the virtual machine version of AROS. Works pretty well too.

Good luck.

[skilgannon]

Cool - thanks for the update. I'll give that a try. I actually have Parallels but not installed it yet.  My Mac is a unibody one too but can't remember if it is 2.16 or 2.4 ghz but it only has 2gb ram.  Might try and upgrade the ram (which I think means replacing the ram already in it - what a waste!).  On a seperate note, have you tried playing any PC games using Parallels?

[persia]

VMWare Fusions Unity Mode also works with Amiga Forever.  Sun's Virtual Box does not have a Unity/Coherence mode but is free and Amiga Forever runs in it.

I have a macbook unibody 15" late 2008. I USE XP with Parallels instead of bootcamp. In coherence mode the XP desktop integrates with the mac desktop and you can run Amiga forever as if it was a Mac ap. I use this all the time with real powerfull apps like Catia, 3dsMAx, Lightwave, and Photoshop. Recommend 4 gigs of ram 2 at the very least.

Amiga Forever doesn't have an equivalent on the mac.

One other note, AROS live works with Parallels very easy to use the virtual machine version of AROS. Works pretty well too.

Good luck.

[Crom00]

Have not tried to play PC games throguh paralells. I THINK you'll get performace of a 1.8 ghz-2.hgz single-Dual core (not core 2 duo) with a basic DirectX 9 card with shader model 3.

Games in bootcamp run at full speed. kind of...The unibody mac 2008 has a unacknowledged defect where the drivers won't allow you to run the graphics at full speed in vista. The machine locks up. So I use a 3rd party utiliy to underclock the GFX so the machine doesnt crash.

That's why I use Parallels and USE Bootcamp only when I need to.Do not try VISTA with Parllels, it's too slow, virtually unusable on our laptops.

Vista with Bootcamp would be peftect aside from the following issues:


Aduio Crackling
Freezes requiring reboot
Use of Flash web pages while using trackpad causes crashes so you have to disable it and use a mouse...

of course apple doesn't acknowledge these issues and blames windows vista yet they use the whole Bootcamp dual boot capability as a unique selling point.

[persia]

I've never tried Parallels how does it compare to Fusion?  they sound pretty much identical.

[skilgannon]

Thanks Crom00, I have an Optimised XP Pro build I was thinking of using.  Persia, I read through this benchmark report between Parallels and Fusion.  Have a read - looks interesting http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.04/VMBenchmarks/index.html

[chiark]

I'm using VirtualBox from Sun: it's free .  No coherence mode, but you can hide the desktop which is damn near, or just use spaces to have Windows in a separate environment.

How's the performance under parallels?

[lsmart]

Amiga Forever doesn't have an equivalent on the mac.

One other note, AROS live works with Parallels very easy to use the virtual machine version of AROS. Works pretty well too.
Good luck.

I had different experiences. I am pretty happy using E-UAE and Hi-Torro on my Macs (using parts of Amiga Forever), but I was not satisfied with AROS on Parallels. Networking would sent one CPU going berzerk and grinding the VM to a halt until the transfer was completed. It also failed to recognize any USB-Thumbdrive. I am talking about a "native" AROS install with Parallels not the hosted model.

The only downside of E-UAE on Macs in my experience is that it is a bit slow in window-mode, it´s better in fullscreen-mode.