Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!daveh From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Amiga Emulators Message-ID: <4959@cbmvax.UUCP> Date: 7 Oct 88 15:21:03 GMT References: <389@ga.ecn.purdue.edu> Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA Lines: 31 in article <389@ga.ecn.purdue.edu>, rodmar@ga.ecn.purdue.edu (Rodney L Martin) says: > > It may be true that there is a mac emulator COMING out for the amiga, and that > it is faster than an SE on the Atari ST. The difference being that the SE runs a slightly slower clock rate than the ST, and also, in typical Apple style, has more things that get in the way of the 68000 (though fewer than on a Mac Plus, I hear). You're really not EMULATING much of anything here; Macs run 68000 instructions, STs run 68000 instructions, Macs use a single bitmapped display, and that's one of the ST video modes, etc. You may have to emulate a Mac I/O chip or something, but since more if not all of the Mac applications go through the Mac's toolbox ROM, these "emulators" may just replace the proper routines with ST-native versions of the same. In any case, it's really just porting the Mac OS over to the ST. If Apple didn't watch their code like hawks, it wouldn't be much more difficult than porting MS-DOS to yet another clone machine. > My question was why the IBM emulator on the ST is so much faster than on the > Amiga. Isn't the Amiga a more powerful machine? Same reason the BASIC that comes with the Amiga is so much faster than the BASIC that comes with the ST. Or any number of other similar comparisons. The PC emulator that runs on the Amiga was a POORLY WRITTEN piece of software. Apparently the PC emulator that runs on the ST was better written. These things do happen. If this unnamed PC emulator for the ST were ported to the Amiga, it would give similar performance. -- Dave Haynie "The 32 Bit Guy" Commodore-Amiga "The Crew That Never Rests" {ihnp4|uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: D-DAVE H BIX: hazy "I can't relax, 'cause I'm a Boinger!"