AGA Question

[rattlehead]

I have a question that I was wondering if the technical guys on this site might be able to help me understand.  Or at least I will give a whole bunch of people on this site something to flame me about. As I see that happens on these forums a lot.

If the WinUAE program supports AGA thru emulation why isn't it possible to write a program or emulator that will run on the current stock of Graphics card for the Amiga that will emulate the AGA chips on an ECS amiga or the new Indivision ECS.  Yes obviously the standard unaccelerated Amigas won't be able to handle this but how about the ones that have 060 or PPC accerlators in them.  I mean we talk about how the system multitasks well how about a subroutine that redirects the video output to a graphics card or Indivision ECS that will use the same type of emulator that is being used on the UAE system.

Has then been tried before?

Rattlehead

[nagaflas]

If the WinUAE program supports AGA thru emulation why isn't it possible to write a program or emulator that will run on the current stock of Graphics card for the Amiga that will emulate the AGA chips on an ECS amiga or the new Indivision ECS.  

Has then been tried before?

Rattlehead

This has been done before. In fact, an AGA emulator was released into the public domain years ago from 17-Bit in the UK I believe. It takes quite a bit of computing power to use; as I recall, you needed an '040 and plenty of RAM.

[brianb]

I have a question that I was wondering if the technical guys on this site might be able to help me understand.  Or at least I will give a whole bunch of people on this site something to flame me about. As I see that happens on these forums a lot.

If the WinUAE program supports AGA thru emulation why isn't it possible to write a program or emulator that will run on the current stock of Graphics card for the Amiga that will emulate the AGA chips on an ECS amiga or the new Indivision ECS.  Yes obviously the standard unaccelerated Amigas won't be able to handle this but how about the ones that have 060 or PPC accerlators in them.  I mean we talk about how the system multitasks well how about a subroutine that redirects the video output to a graphics card or Indivision ECS that will use the same type of emulator that is being used on the UAE system.

Has then been tried before?

Rattlehead

Well I think you have to remember in the case of WinAUE... You're emulating-down, not emulating up.   What I mean by that is your running that emulator on a computer with gigs of memory, gigahertz+ cpu, and millions of colors.  

Emulation can't make old hardware do more then it was originally capable of...  Emulation just creates "virtual hardware" using the copious amounts of computing power we have today.  I don't think you would have the CPU power on even an '040 for that type of emulation...

[SamuraiCrow]

http://rcdrummond.net/uae/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4/e-uae_0.8.29-WIP4_amigaos-m68k.lha

[nagaflas]

For what it's worth, there is a PD program called "Soft AGA" that was distributed by 17-Bit/Quartz PD. It is on disk 4511.

[Piru]

That "Soft AGA" is a joke, in case someone didn't get it. The only way to emulate AGA is thru UAE.

[amiga1260]

I saw in a German magazine "Amiga Magazin" issue 1/97" an expansion to transform an A500 to a fully blown A1200.

It has Kickstart 3.1, AGA Chipset, 68020@14 Mhz processor and a Expansion slot to expand it with faster accelator cards. It called AGAGo.

Here you can find a small picture of it:

http://www.amiga-magazin.de/magazin/a01-97/messe.html

[dougal]

Sorry to bring up this old thread again.

I'm sure it is not impossible for somebody to create some sort of AGA emulation for ECS machines with say an RTG and a powerful processor like a 50Mhz '030 or an '040.

Maybe it could be in the form of a hacked WhdLoad or some sort of patcher program.

RTG cards are much much faster then AGA and offer up to 16.7 million colors at much higher resolutions as opposed to the 256 colors that AGA can offer. That coupled with a decent CPU and some fastram and i can't see why it would be doable.

Its a bummer having an RTG with its fast blitter (super fast compared to AGA), much more colors and higher resolutions but then being limited to ECS games & demos.

Look at SimCity 2000 as an example. The Amiga version will run on an unexpanded A1200 with 2MB chipram but it won't run on say an A3000 with a 68060 processor and Picasso IV.

[Piru]

Sorry to bring up this old thread again.

I'm sure it is not impossible for somebody to create some sort of AGA emulation for ECS machines with say an RTG and a powerful processor like a 50Mhz '030 or an '040.

It's not.

Maybe it could be in the form of a hacked WhdLoad or some sort of patcher program.

No and no.

RTG cards are much much faster then AGA and offer up to 16.7 million colors at much higher resolutions as opposed to the 256 colors that AGA can offer. That coupled with a decent CPU and some fastram and i can't see why it would be doable.

Nope. 68k, even 68060@100 is way too slow (assuming you'd want to reach A1200 performance).

Amiga RTG cards (even Radeon with PCI) aren't much faster than native AGA anyway. The bus solutions are very slow.

Its a bummer having an RTG with its fast blitter (super fast compared to AGA), much more colors and higher resolutions but then being limited to ECS games & demos.

Look at SimCity 2000 as an example. The Amiga version will run on an unexpanded A1200 with 2MB chipram but it won't run on say an A3000 with a 68060 processor and Picasso IV.

The chipset emulation is easily the most CPU demanding part of the UAE emulation. Emulating the CPU is trivial task in comparison.

So no, m68k can't do it. Not anywhere near full speed at least.

You can see this easily by trying to run UAE (and enabling A1200 kind of configuration) on OCS/ECS machine with a graphics card. It will crawl. It's nowhere near usable speed.

[dougal]

@Piru

I guess that puts the myth to rest then. The only way for AGA is with a 1200/4000/CD32 or Winuae.

[Piru]

@Piru

I guess that puts the myth to rest then. The only way for AGA is with a 1200/4000/CD32 or Winuae.

Well, technically you can run UAE with AGA configuration on OCS/ECS amiga. It's just too slow to be really usable.

The closest would probably be A3000 + CS PPC 233 + CyberVisionPPC, running PowerUP MorphOS and PPC native UAE. My guess would be that it'd still struggle to reach usable speeds... and of course it wouldn't be 68k anymore.

[smerf]

Hi,

Guess that just goes to show, winuae is good for something, but I should know that I use it every day.

smerf

[utri007]

Better idea would be add virtual layer for 68k amigas, so that every nodos game could run in vga screen.

Something like VMware for 68k amigas, migh have performance problems but.. it would be faster than UEA for 68k

[Piru]

Better idea would be add virtual layer for 68k amigas, so that every nodos game could run in vga screen.

Something like VMware for 68k amigas, migh have performance problems but.. it would be faster than UEA for 68k

Can you give us any technical explanation as to how this would work then?

If not, this is just hot air and wishful thinking.

[darkage]

haha SoftAGA good joke..  Couldn't find any references on the net.

What the?!?!?!     seriously VMware for 68k even better joke   Poor little machine will have its CPU clock cycles abused crawling to a halt..  Poor Amiga!