The Emulators Thread

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Narf the Mouse
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Joined: Mon Nov 30, 2015 6:32 pm

The Emulators Thread

Post by Narf the Mouse »

Mostly, I use PCem and WinUAE

PCem emulates old 80s and 90s IBM-compatibles; very demanding, hardware-wise, at the higher options. It has a strong focus on accuracy, replicating almost everything in software, down to the brand, make, and model of CPU and optional Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2. v13 is probably coming out in November.

Because of the strong focus on accuracy, including CPU timings, if it runs on the original hardware, it will very likely run on PCem. This also means that it is very demanding on hardware... It has a yearly release cadence, as there is only a very *small team working on it. However, most problems are fixed in a matter of days, and you can download the current code and compile it - there's build guides for Windows and Linux, although I haven't tried the Linux build guide.

Although PCem includes a recompiler, it is a somewhat buggy and new addition - If a necessary one for some configurations.

WinUAE emulates all the Commodore Amigas, including Amigas that never were (by mixing and matching options). While it has cycle-accurate modes, it is only truly cycle-accurate for the 68000 processor. In addition, it is less focused on accuracy, and more focused on the ability to run your emulated Amiga as fast as your rig can manage, including a JIT recompiler. Despite the fact that people have replicated an Amiga CPU on all sorts of FPGA, WinUAE at full speed at JIT compiled is still by far the fastest Amiga out there.

If you missed out on having an A4000T configuration with a 30+ GB HDD, graphics card, and 128 MB of RAM, or even anything past the A500, WinUAE can do that, and more. (Our local Amiga computer club was mostly a group of people who hung out and gaped in awe at our comps without any real understanding of them, and you had to drive for over an hour to get to a computer store)

In addition, I have to add that games that take advantage of the Amiga's native sound and graphics blow their IBM-compatible yearly counter-parts out of the water until late in the Amigas life (when Commodore was finishing up spike-dunking the ball into the flaming tar pit), although that's due to the platform differences; both emulators are quite good.

* In fact, as far as I know, the team has only recently expanded from one! Nevertheless, it has had an astounding amount of work put into it.
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