best emulator solution for old paltop?

[spinal]

I was recently given an old thinkpad 380ed (166mhz, 80mb ram 2gb hard drive) and I was thinking of turning it into a dedicated amiga emulator, having the os load straight into the emu, giving the illusion ofr an amiga laptop.

What whould be the best OS+emulator combination for such a maching?

I have currently msdos, win3.11, win95, win98, winxp. and am not afraid to download any of the free os's out there.

Am I likely to get any reasonable speed out of the emulator?

[Colani1200]

spinal wrote:
Am I likely to get any reasonable speed out of the emulator?

I think it will be painfully slow. I guess the only way to turn this into an Amiga-like Laptop at a reasonable speed will be running AROS natively.

[spinal]

I'm not expecting a lightning speed situation here, I remember my old A600 was quite slow.

[kidkoala]

I guess he's right, Aros is probably the best solution since it doesn't emulate. Emulation is a very resource-demanding way to use a computer, a high-spec. computer is needed to emulate a low-spec. system (like Amiga, without offending anyone).

I've tried to install Aros from floppy to my Commodore 486DX laptop, with no luck. Then again it was merely a try I just put the floppy in to see what happened. Loading grub went fine but system halted halfway through Aros boot-up.

If you try let me hear whwat happened, I've thought of asking the guys over at Aros-exec or something what to do, I'm sure it's feasable.

FreeDos works great on the laptop thought, playing high-mem games and even using a mouse was no trouble.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Maybe the old "Fellow" emulator is fast enough? For Amiga500/600 emulation that is...

[Speelgoedmannetje]

spinal wrote:
I'm not expecting a lightning speed situation here, I remember my old A600 was quite slow.

Not in that way slow, slow as in continuous hickups, not synchronous video/audio and so, I mean: as in unusable.

[Piru]

Best solution is either Fellow or WinUAE. As pointed out, it won't be fast. For best performance you should try dos + fellow. It only emulates A500, but it should be faster than UAE. It won't be as compatible though.

AROS is no emulator.

[spinal]

I'm hoping to be able to play some ye-olde games such as lemmings and cannon fodder. I gave fellow a go running from win95, it seemed a little slower than my old 600, but i might be wrong. The only thing is my laptop creen does not stretch lower resolutions, so 640x480 is centered witha black border around it

[LoadWB]

Depending upon the laptop, there should be a Function key (Fn+ something) that will stretch that out, or possibly a setting in the BIOS.  If it's a key, it will look like a little monitor, one solid monitor transposed with an outline of a monitor, or it may say "Screen" or "Font".

Maybe the manufacturer's support web site can help with this (good luck:-))

[kidkoala]

@piru

nobody said aros is en emulator..

[Colani1200]

kidkoala wrote:
@piru

nobody said aros is en emulator..

Which sadly reminds us of the probably most important Aros bounty still being unassigned. Anybody?

[InTheSand]

spinal wrote:
I'm hoping to be able to play some ye-olde games such as lemmings and cannon fodder.

I hate to say this, but given the 166MHz CPU speed, you might be better off installing Win98 + sound drivers + graphics drivers + DirectX and using it for DOS and early Windows games directly, rather than Amiga games via emulation...

Both Cannon Fodder and Lemmings are available in ye-olde PC versions, and your laptop should also run classics like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D with no problem...

 - Ali

[spinal]

LoadWB wrote:
Depending upon the laptop, there should be a Function key (Fn+ something) that will stretch that out, or possibly a setting in the BIOS.  If it's a key, it will look like a little monitor, one solid monitor transposed with an outline of a monitor, or it may say "Screen" or "Font".

Neither Ill look at the website next.

[Merc]

I first ran UAE on a Pentium 75 and it wasn't *totally* unusable, so on a 166 I would imagine it would be OK... but I would expect a lot of games to be slower than normal.  

I'd say give it a try and see how well it works.  You might be able to degrade the settings a bit (decrease the sound quality & framerate) and make it fast enough for your uses