Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!udel!brahms.udel.edu!don From: don@brahms.udel.edu (Donald R Lloyd) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: Amiga ST Emulators (was Re: TT's and NeXT) Keywords: Junk Message-ID: <17129@brahms.udel.edu> Date: 1 Jan 91 16:20:13 GMT References: <17097@brahms.udel.edu> Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 74 In article mspacek@fquest.fidonet.org (Mark Spacek) writes: > >I've heard of one that sounds very similar to the one you posted about, I >have to wonder if its not the same one. But the price was 195$, which >seems a little more realistic, and it would only work on a 2000 or 3000, >not a 500. Did the AmigaWorld article say which models it worked on?i No, it did't say. I imagine MAST's board is just a place to plug in ROMs & whatever custom stuff is needed to emulate an ST. Wouldn't be surprised if it sits in the 68000 socket with the 68K plugged into the emulator board. There's another I've heard of, which may be one you're talking about, called Medusa. I beleive it's an actual Zorro II (the bus on the 2000) card, so it won't plug into a 500. >You say the article stated that text speed was 120% of an ST and disk I/O >108% of an ST. I would be curious to know how the numbers would compare >if you used one of the inexpensive 'software blitters' like Quick ST or >Turbo ST and used disks with a 'twisted' sector skew in the tests. Many, >if not most ST users do these things and thus increase their performance >greatly without spending much. I'd be curious whether you could do this >on the emulator and how it would compare to an ST then. The claimed speed increase is probably due to the Amiga's hardware blitter. I guess the s/w for the emulator makes use of it somehow. I really have no idea how the various ST speed-ups would work, but it'd be interesting to see. >Also, the >software emulator I saw working worked at a decent speed when in high-res >monochrome mode (flicker often got pretty bad though). But, in medium >and low res modes, the speed was significantly slower - not anywhere near >what the high-res was. I guess that was it having to keep up with the >color planes. I'm not saying that the others are this way to, it just >makes me wonder. In Germany it wouldn't matter so much, as the migh-res >monochrome mode is the most popular way to set up STs there, and most of >the software will run in that resolution. I haven't seen any of them in action, so I'm not sure about their relative speed. What I'd be more interested to know is whether they'll work with non-68000 Amigas... I've got a 25MHz A3000 here (which also kills the flicker problem). Do they take over the machine entirely (a la Amax) or will they run as a process under AmigaDOS, or even come with their own on-board processor? HD support? As you can see, I've got a few questions about these emulators myself.... >You said that there were several ST emulators in Germany and this was >based on one of them. Perhaps its not the same one I read about then, >but I had only read about one confirmed ST emulator in Germany. It had >been demonstrated at a computer show over there. Of course, I could have >easily missed the others, I don't subscribe to German computer mags.... I'm fairly sure I've read reports of two emulators being shown, but I can't remember where I read about them, and it was only a brief blurb somewhere without much information. (It'd be interesting if a TT emulator showed up here before the TT did :-) Don't take this as Atari bashing or Amiga fanaticism (despite my .sig) but I really don't think there's much of a market in the US for ST emulators. The only legitimate users will most likely be those who have switched or are thinking about switching from ST to Ami. Others will most likely just get it as an "oh, and I can do this, too" kind of thing, pirate a few pieces of ST software, and proceed to let it collect dust. Of course, there's always the problem of how to get ST ROMs, and they'll probably end up being pirated also, such as has been done with the Amax Mac emulator. Just dump the ROMs to disk & hack the emulator code to load it from disk. Pirating an entire computer is sinking pretty low, but that's what's very likely to happen with these ST emulators... -- Gibberish Amiga 3000 owner/fanatic is spoken Contact don@brahms.udel.edu for more information. here. DISCLAIMER: It's all YOUR fault.