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[Lobotomika]

This has been bugging me for a while, like a few years. I have been emulating various systems since 1996. Back in 98 when I had recently purchased a Pentium II - 350 mhz, I could already emulate various consoles as well as arcade games while amiga emulation was a bit problematic. Sound was skippy, winuae was still in early 0.8.x versions etc. but it was understandable back then. Somewhat.

Of course modern PCs handle UAE perfectly today but I still don't understand why other host platforms are having problems with it.

Nintendo DS: Weak hardware yet has perfect neo-geo, sega mega drive, turbografx emulation as well as a x86 emulator that runs VGA versions of old amiga games perfectly. Also has an alpha quality ST emulator. An amiga emulator is said to be impossible for DS.

Nintendo Wii: Handles all 8-16 bit consoles, neo-geo as well as Mame perfectly. Amiga emulation suffers from severe synchronization issues.

Sony PSP: Handles 8-16 bit consoles as well as neo-geo cps-1 and cps-2 perfectly. Amiga emulation experience varies from playable to downright terrible.

As I said above, I can understand that the unique architecture of amiga making emulation harder than other platforms but I can't understand how a machine that can emulate CAPCOM PLAY SYSTEM TWO perfectly can be so inefficient when it comes to Amiga.

Maybe the problem lies not with Amiga but with UAE. Maybe UAE authors are a bit too obsessive about coding a low level emulator or maybe something in UAE code is making optimizations for different host platforms harder. Is there any truth to these theories? Still, it blows my mind how there hasn't been a faster alternative to UAE for years. I'm talking about one that isn't dead like fellow and one that concentrates of getting stuff run at reasonable speeds rather than aiming for 100% compatibility.

[FOL]

This has been bugging me for a while, like a few years. I have been emulating various systems since 1996. Back in 98 when I had recently purchased a Pentium II - 350 mhz, I could already emulate various consoles as well as arcade games while amiga emulation was a bit problematic. Sound was skippy, winuae was still in early 0.8.x versions etc. but it was understandable back then. Somewhat.

Of course modern PCs handle UAE perfectly today but I still don't understand why other host platforms are having problems with it.

Nintendo DS: Weak hardware yet has perfect neo-geo, sega mega drive, turbografx emulation as well as a x86 emulator that runs VGA versions of old amiga games perfectly. Also has an alpha quality ST emulator. An amiga emulator is said to be impossible for DS.

Nintendo Wii: Handles all 8-16 bit consoles, neo-geo as well as Mame perfectly. Amiga emulation suffers from severe synchronization issues.

Sony PSP: Handles 8-16 bit consoles as well as neo-geo cps-1 and cps-2 perfectly. Amiga emulation experience varies from playable to downright terrible.

As I said above, I can understand that the unique architecture of amiga making emulation harder than other platforms but I can't understand how a machine that can emulate CAPCOM PLAY SYSTEM TWO perfectly can be so inefficient when it comes to Amiga.

Maybe the problem lies not with Amiga but with UAE. Maybe UAE authors are a bit too obsessive about coding a low level emulator or maybe something in UAE code is making optimizations for different host platforms harder. Is there any truth to these theories? Still, it blows my mind how there hasn't been a faster alternative to UAE for years. I'm talking about one that isn't dead like fellow and one that concentrates of getting stuff run at reasonable speeds rather than aiming for 100% compatibility.

Easy way to some it up;

The PSP is like a PC was 10 years ago. Back then they used asm, unfurtunately they dont any more as its not needed on newer PC's.

I have been been trying to carry this as best I can for the last 4 years, no one wants to help any more.
The amount of threads regarding this and me having to explain averytime is getting annoying, .

There is an asm core (one of the arcade emulators you mentioned uses it), but no one wants to help intergrate it into PSPUAE. I dont know ASM, so I cant get it to work.

The other thing that annoys me, is PSPUAE gets a tough time. Even though its as fast (if not slightly faster) as UAE4ALL (obviously not the ASM version).

Important things I see at present are;

1. ASM Core,
2. HDD Support,
3. Sound Sorted.

Sorry if I come across as harsh, but I am fed up of having to explain myself over and over.

[TCD]

The difference between the Amiga and most consoles is the architecture of the system. Most Amiga games use the two most important custom chips 'blitter' and 'copper', which adds to the 'load' the emulator has to cope with. Like FOL said you need a highly optimised code to deal with it on slower platforms (and you might need to trade some compatibility for it as well).

[Lobotomika]

Sorry if I come across as harsh, but I am fed up of having to explain myself over and over.

Don't worry about that. I understand and respect people who're actively doing things for the community. If I sound annoyed it's because so much has been done for the other platforms such as SNES yet so little for the Amiga. Sure UAE is great once you have the power (and the Windows port is awesome) but that is still a condition many devices can't meet. Yes, PSP is like a PC from 10 years ago but I prefer to consider the last decade as a wasted opportunity for an alternative, non-uae emulator to arrive or at least a different approach on paper. 333Mhz today didn't have to translate to 333Mhz of 10 years ago if you know what I mean. I guess the previous popularity of the systems directly effect the number of dedicated people today.

And yes, I'm aware of Amiga's architecture but I'll still think a machine that can run Street Fighter Alpha 3 perfectly may be able to run Silkworm without skipping frames.

[FOL]

Sorry if I come across as harsh, but I am fed up of having to explain myself over and over.

Don't worry about that. I understand and respect people who're actively doing things for the community. If I sound annoyed it's because so much has been done for the other platforms such as SNES yet so little for the Amiga. Sure UAE is great once you have the power (and the Windows port is awesome) but that is still a condition many devices can't meet. Yes, PSP is like a PC from 10 years ago but I prefer to consider the last decade as a wasted opportunity for an alternative, non-uae emulator to arrive or at least a different approach on paper. 333Mhz today didn't have to translate to 333Mhz of 10 years ago if you know what I mean. I guess the previous popularity of the systems directly effect the number of dedicated people today.

And yes, I'm aware of Amiga's architecture but I'll still think a machine that can run Street Fighter Alpha 3 perfectly may be able to run Silkworm without skipping frames.

It also depends on what each game is doing. Some hammer the Hardware, where others dont. So some games will run decent, and others wont.

[TCD]

Yes, PSP is like a PC from 10 years ago but I prefer to consider the last decade as a wasted opportunity for an alternative, non-uae emulator to arrive or at least a different approach on paper.

It would still have to deal with the same problems. You'd need to make a non-portable, native emulator to squeeze the maximum performance out of 'underpowered' platforms. Doing that from scratch is a huge effort.

And yes, I'm aware of Amiga's architecture but I'll still think a machine that can run Street Fighter Alpha 3 perfectly may be able to run Silkworm without skipping frames.

Read what FOL said. Street Fighter Alpha 3 'just' uses an 68000 and came on a ROM, which is a big difference. Even if it 'looks' much better and runs on a 16 Mhz instead of 7 Mhz CPU, that doesn't mean it's harder to emulate.

Anyway, find a PSP ASM coder that knows the Amiga inside out that would make an emu for free...

[Lobotomika]

Anyway, find a PSP ASM coder that knows the Amiga inside out that would make an emu for free...

That's not really a counter argument now is it? Also FYI CPS-2 is not a CPU-only issue as that hardware also has custom chips. I just don't have further knowledge about them though.

[FOL]

Anyway, find a PSP ASM coder that knows the Amiga inside out that would make an emu for free...

That's not really a counter argument now is it? Also FYI CPS-2 is not a CPU-only issue as that hardware also has custom chips. I just don't have further knowledge about them though.

Yes, but not the same as the Amiga. Alot more goes into Amiga, thats what made it the computer it was.
Give PSPUAE an asm core and Im damn sure you will get FullSpeed on almost everything.

[TCD]

Also FYI CPS-2 is not a CPU-only issue as that hardware also has custom chips.

FYI it doesn't : http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/techinfo.html At least not for graphics.

[Lobotomika]

I think number 13 on the first photo are.

[TCD]

Those are the same as the OCS, ECS, or AGA chipset, which we didn't took into consideration above. If you want a closer look what's needed to emulate the CPS2 in MAME have a look here : http://mamedev.org/source/src/mame/drivers/cps2.c.html
You'll see that it's just mentioned as 'graphic generating hardware', because the actual graphic logic is stored in the rom (which is the difference I mentioned above). Search for 'ROM_START( sfa3 )'.
Anyway, I hope that sheds some light on why it's possible to run SFA3 smooth with a C core, while it isn't possible to run every Amiga game with the same coding method.

[Lobotomika]

Not that I totally understood it but i guess it makes more sense now and thank you for the clarification.