Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!yale!eagle!jtreworgy
From: jtreworgy@eagle.wesleyan.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Emulators (was Re: 1.4 FFS on Floppies?? )
Message-ID: <4120@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Date: 28 Nov 89 12:30:50 GMT
References: <4666@lab.udel.EDU> <21@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz> <128445@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Lines: 29

In article <128445@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>, cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) writes:
> In article <21@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz> (Ian Farquhar 7420) writes:
>>However, it is not TECHNICALLY impossible to produce an Amiga emulator,
>>the difficulty is one of motive, and of legal considerations.
> 
> It is technically impossible to emulate the Amiga on an Atari ST. The Amiga
> has a larger color map, stereo digital sound (4 channels), and a very powerful
> Copper that runs in parallel to the CPU. None of these exist on the current
> ST (although some of them are on the ST-E). Yes, I've seen Spectrum512 and
> it's variants but 512 != 4096 no matter how much you squint. Sorry, end of
> discussion. The Amiga can't emulate a VGA card either, so what? 
> --Chuck McManis

That's fine... but the Transformer which we claim emulates an IBM doesn't have
any graphics or sound emulation whatsoever. You wouldn't NEED to emulate HAM
mode to have a reasonably complete Amiga (the only things that use it are
digitising & respective paint programs and for looking at pretty pictures).
Still, though, any Atari ST trying to emulate Amiga graphics (copper etc) would
be extremely slow...

On the other side of the coin, though, I'm still surprised no-one has released
an Atari ST emulator commercially. It seems to me like that would be a lot
easier to copy than a Macintosh, and you wouldn't need any hardware with it
either. Maybe no one thinks there would be any interest, but from what I have
heard the music software for the ST is far superior to likewise existing on the
Amiga (of course you'd need to wire up a MIDI interface).

--  James A. Treworgy    -- No quote here for insurance reasons --
jtreworgy@eagle.wesleyan.edu         jtreworgy%eagle@WESLEYAN.BITNET