10/25/2010

Emulator vs. the real thing

Dear readers!

have already made some posts about games on the Amiga, hopefully reviving the memories of that great era. But in the heat of the moment, I almost forgot to tell you about emulators: a wonderful and easy way to "virtualize" a whole Amiga setup on your PC.

There are two popular freeware emulators around, UAE (available for MS Windows, Linux, Mac-OS) and Fellow. Both have been out for many years now and I tested both of them. I ended up using WinUAE though, since it ran stable and gave the majority of tweakable parameters.










It offers you default setups for standard A500, A600, A1200, A2000 and so on! Speed them up by adding RAM, pick another processor, choose Input devices, add hard-drives - no problem, just a few clicks! WinUAE can even emulate the god-like chattering sound of the floppy-disk, while it is loading into memory.


So for those of you who want to play around with an Amiga, but do not own one anymore - try an emulator, it is close to the real thing!

Along with the emulator, you might also need:
  • Kickstart 1.3 and 2.0 ... that is the firmware, stored on the ROM chip of the Amiga
  • Amiga Workbench ... the OS, you might need it in order to run some games or text-to-speech in "Say" ;)
  • games!
The problem here might be the copyright. Nevertheless all of the software can easily be found on the internet^^

Have fun and happy guru meditation!


13 comments:

  1. Well written post OP. I like it alot hope to see more from you.

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  2. i'll definitely try it. great blog, man. keep it up ;)

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  3. Hey, where do the copyrights for amiga games fall? Are they all free and clear these days do to the fact that Amiga hardware is all but non-existent and therefore the software is unsupported?

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  4. @Lazy Geographer:

    it always depends on the specific game and those who hold the rights on it. some stuff is already available for free as abandonware, then there are games which are still protected by copyright.

    this is why i can't offer games per download, even the kickstart and amigaOS mentioned above are copyright protected. when commodore went bankrupt, it was sold to escom.. later to gateway 2000.

    personally, i don't believe they will sue anybody for downloading their stuff, but who can be sure these days?! anyhow there are 100's of threads and links on the web, where ppl offer to send the required software via ICQ or uploaded it to rapidshare and so on ;)

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  5. Thanks for the tip. Next time I'm bored in class I know what to do. ;)

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  6. thanks, helped me a lot

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  7. Thanks. This post was very useful.

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  8. I'd love to combine both!

    I use Project 64 atm but I'd love to get a USB adapter for an N64 controller. That'd be so sweet

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  9. sometimes geting a really old console nowadays is hard so emulators ftw.i dont play with my original cartidges on my consoles because they will become worn off

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  10. I'm pretty sure that MAME is also free and works perfectly with the amiga system? o_O

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  11. @nokel: that's right, MAME is free and runs smooth on many systems since it is open source.

    MAME stands for multiple arcade machine emulator. it emulates almost 5000 old arcade games. there's most likely a version for the amiga os somewhere out there..

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  12. ... to clear up the confusion

    WinUAE emulates the amiga system
    MAME emulates arcade machines on windows, linux etc..

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