OK, not the real topic, but how do the Amiga programs written for an Agnus, Denise, and Paula run on a MorphOS system (which is APPLE hardware) without an Agnus, Denise, or Paula (let's ignore Gary, Ramsey, etc. for now)?
Programs that explicitly needs those chips present (for "HW banging" instead of using Amiga OS API's in the proper way) will indeed need an emulator, and you can download UAE for those (mostly) games. You can easily set it up so that UAE is transparently started when you double-click the game/app icon. But practically all applications that followed the correct, formal guidelines from Commodore and using OS calls instead, will work fully native, side by side with programs compiled directly for MorphOS, in the same memory space, sharing the same sheduler, the same system resources (both HW/SW/OS), etc. No difference from a real Amiga, no emulation layer in between. And this actually goes for most Amiga applications you would want to use today.
Wikipedia says, "Emulation addresses the original hardware and software environment of the digital object, and recreates it on a current machine."
True, a C64 emulator that only emulates the HW wouldn't be much fun, would it? The HW is the vessel, the SW the soul. Without it, you would only have a bunch of useless "silicon", that you can't even look at or use as a door stop, since it's all "virtual". So the "ROM" is needed as well. In many emulators of consoles, you only need one ROM file that includes the game and everything. On UAE you need the Kickstart ROM for the system, and a separate ADF "ROM" for the SW. But this is emulation we are talking about now, which is not how MorphOS usually runs Amiga SW.
This describes MorphOS
No.
AROS
Only partly, when trying to run 68k apps on x86 HW, since AROS uses UAE for that.
UAE
True. UAE is an emulator.
and any software that pretends, imitates, or in any other fashion, lies to you saying it is an Amiga when it is not.
MorphOS provides a fully native Amiga API environment, and all programs runs natively on that. Programs are not normally (unless using UAE) run on an emulator, not if you don't want to. UAE isn't even included on MorphOS, since it's not needed. It's all native. On an emulator, you first start up a program (running on top of the native OS) that creates a little "box" consisting of a necessary HW/SW environment, and it is this program that then "executes" the game/program inside that box, taking care of HW calls, OS calls, all SW, etc, etc. This is emulation, and this is absolutely not how MorphOS runs Amiga apps. They are run directly/natively on the OS, no emulation layer in between, they are not executed within some "emulator program".
it only recreates an Amiga-like environment
It provides a full Amiga environment, fully native, on HW that isn't Amiga HW (thus doesn't have the Amiga custom chips).
(and poorly since there is MorphOS software that will not run on an Amiga).
MorphOS SW compiled as 68k that won't run on an Amiga probably uses features that MorphOS has that Amiga OS simply doesn't have. There has been a lot of evolution in MorphOS as well, backwards compatibility has been prioritized, but MorphOS is so much more than that. MorphOS has gone quite far beyond the point where Amiga OS stopped. It has stuff that Amiga OS never had. An A500 with WB1.2 can't run all OS3.1 apps. It's quite natural...
