I must admit it's been a while since Ive used Qemu. Just curious what hardware does it support in the way of gfx, sound and nics? If memory serves me correctly for gfx it can use s3 or cirrus logic gfx emulation (cant recall models)? Sound and nic I have no idea. Id assume some sort ac97 or sb compatible sound (just guessing here as theyre the most typically ones).
As alluded to one plus of running amithlon in such a way is for development purposes. Thus far neither (gfx) have amithlon support, but both have drivers available for amigaos (although actual chipset support may be different). Get supported hardware running, and suddenly amithlon in qemu (or similar) makes a bit more sense for "proper" usage. Especially if dma for drive access can be enabled.
One other thing to consider here though as well is that running it virtualised, even with VT support and a person loses some l2/l3 cache, which makes a pretty decent difference to amithlon (why running amithlon on a quad core system will be faster than on a single/dual core system..... only one core is used, but that inherrits entire caches(assuming some sort of shared cache architecture, which most cpus have these days)).
Each to thier own and whatnot, but personally I wouldnt use amithlon on anything but a fully supported system. Having said that though running it on a fully supported system is an absolute joy to use and Id use it over any form of uae any day of the week. It really is like an amiga platform unto itself. Unfortunately because of the way things panned out not many people got the chance to experience it and understand why very few people will use UAE after theyve used amithlon on a properly supported system.
And as good as it is there's still plenty of untapped potential waiting to be unlocked
Big Endian X86 AROS running on Amithlon for example could be very cool. Running 68k and x86 software concurrently OS4/MOS style is possible if someone cares to do the work
