Does anyone know if...

[Caldrin]

Does anyone know if... Older Amiga Games will be able to be played on the Amiga One/Amiga OS4? It may be a stupid question, but I am an amiga newbie, and I saw a lot of cool games for the older Amigas that I would like to purchase, but I want to make sure they'll work on the Amiga One/OS4. Ofcourse I don't even have an Amiga One or OS4 yet, but I plan to get'em.

[Tomas]

The orginal plan was so.... The AmigaONE motherboard was supposed to have a socket to hook up a a1200/4000 motherboard so the AmigaONE would get access to all its chipset and such, so it would be fully compitable..

But sadly it didnt end up this way... Now eyetech are supposed to make a 1200/4000 addon card for the a.one, but i honestly believe it will never see the light....  :-(

[Housey]

@Caldrin

You'll probably be able to play them via a UAE port  :-)

[alx]

OS4 will have built-in emulation for running code for the old 68k line of CPUs on the PPC based A1 and accelerator cards.  The problem is that many older games relied on specialised parts of the Amiga's hardware, such as the Copper, and the built-in emulation won't handle this (it's designed for speed, not features).  Of course, there's nothing to stop someone porting UAE to OS4; it might seem crazy at first, but UAE has full chipset emulation.  Untill then, a lot of games won't work (probably the vast majority of the famous "classic" games).

---edit---

Of course, UAE runs on Linux and that runs on the A1.

[Housey]

lol, sorry, that really was a bit of a one line answer I gave!   :lol:

[KennyR]

You'll probably find that the port of UAE that OS4 gets is too slow to be usable. If it gets one at all, that is.

[Wain]

You'll probably find that the port of UAE that OS4 gets is too slow to be usable. If it gets one at all, that is.

What makes you think that??

[alx]

At first it probably won't have JIT, and will probably be very unoptimised.  But surely it'd be usable - UAE without JIT worked fine for "classic" games on a PII 333.  It might be unusable on the Cyberstorm cards (but they'll be on a machine with AGA anyway) but I'd imagine it'd be fine on an A1 - you simply don't need Amithlon type speeds for playing all the old stuff.

[Hardboy]

The current WarpOS version runs some games fine on my setup (603e@160Mhz), and some slow. With an A1 I´ll suppose that it will run most games designed for an a500, like on the a500.

[seer]

At first it probably won't have JIT, and will probably be very unoptimised

Or it could use the JIT in OS4 ? That way, the UAE would "only" need to emulate the OCS/AGA chipset and memory system of the "classic" hardware..

seer wrote:
At first it probably won't have JIT, and will probably be very unoptimised

Or it could use the JIT in OS4 ? That way, the UAE would "only" need to emulate the OCS/AGA chipset and memory system of the "classic" hardware..

That would be an excellent technical achievement if it is possible.

[alx]

Or it could use the JIT in OS4 ? That way, the UAE would "only" need to emulate the OCS/AGA chipset and memory system of the "classic" hardware..

I've said that a few times now, but many people said that either:

a) It couldn't be done
b) It'd somehow make OS4 bloatware
c) There isn't a point

[seer]

That would be an excellent technical achievement if it is possible.

Isn't that something Amiga programmers excell  (sp?) at ? :-)  


I've said that a few times now, but everyone thought either:

Ah, we agree :-D


a) It couldn't be done


IIRC the author of Petunia did say it was difficult/imposible to do, but if history is anything to go by, somehow somebody will make it possible ? A few years back it was said it was impossible to emulate an Amiga on a PC, 12 bit or better sound was impossible on the Amiga..

b) It'd somehow make OS4 bloatware

Hmm.. Wasn't there some feature in OS4 that could make AGA emulation a possibilty ?

c) There isn't a point

Yeah right... The why so many people use WinUAE for the chipset emulation ? If people think it is because we have OS4/MOS native progs by then, lots of people would still love to play the old nostalgia games... Why else would there be MAME and such ;-)

[iamaboringperson]

one word: UAE

[T_Bone]

Wain wrote:

You'll probably find that the port of UAE that OS4 gets is too slow to be usable. If it gets one at all, that is.

What makes you think that??

Because the JIT for UAE is only available in x86, therefore UAE will be even slower than AmigaOS's native emulator. On top of that, you'd need to use the PPC UAE or else face "emulator on top of emulator" bottlenecks.

UAE on a $80 AthlonXP 2500/333 would run magnitudes better than UAE on AmigaOS. It can be done, but it'll be no speed demon.