Hardware PC Emulators

[Puni/Void]

I've been reading a bit about hardware PC emulators for the Amiga lately. I noticed that quite a few was made for the Amiga 500. Have any of you tried such a device? If yes, what was the speed and experience like?

[Harrison]

I did try one many years ago, but for the A2000. It was only a XT emulator I think so quite slow, but it ran DOS stuff quite well that I tried.

I think a 286 hardware emulator was released later. But they have limited appeal these days as they don't offer the graphics card or soundblaster support for DOS gaming, so are limited to business DOS applications mostly.

[Puni/Void]

I did try one many years ago, but for the A2000. It was only a XT emulator I think so quite slow, but it ran DOS stuff quite well that I tried.

I think a 286 hardware emulator was released later. But they have limited appeal these days as they don't offer the graphics card or soundblaster support for DOS gaming, so are limited to business DOS applications mostly.

I agree that they aren't as useful due to the lack of graphics card and SB-support for DOS gaming. However, I'd really like to test it out. ;)

I saw this card on eBay a while ago:

Vortex - Atonce (http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/atonce)

This one is supposed to work with the Amiga 500. Looks interesting!

The Golden Gate series of hardware emulators does even come with a 486 (or 386) CPU. You would need to have a big box Amiga for these ones though.

[Tiago]

I remember i had an emulation for the A600 where i could run MS-DOS very nice, it worked very well, but you could not run anything that would call graphics.... everything that was ascii worked 100%.
I did work a bit with Dbase, Lotus 123 and clipper

but i dont remenber the name of that software :-(

[Puni/Void]

Could it be PC-Task, Tiago?

[Tiago]

Could it be PC-Task, Tiago?

I really don't remeber PG,
It was a single disk that after boots it asked you for ms-dos and then you had the old style green screen with command pront "c:\"

PC-Task? maybe :unsure:

[Harrison]

Sounds like PC-Task. It was a free DOS emulator available from PD libraries.

I also used to use it. It did run things like Lotus 123 and word perfect quite well. And it was useful at the time as I had to use PCs at college for word processing, so it was good to be able to load up the emulator to access the files at home from the Amiga.

[Spirantho]

I have a few bridgeboards: 2386SX (with a 50MHz 80486SLC2 on), GoldenGate 486 (25MHz), A2286 and my A500 has a KCS PowerPC board (10MHz NEC V30 power!!!!).

Any questions? :)

[Harrison]

What can you run with the KCS PowerPC board? was there much support?

[Spirantho]

Not a great deal of support, I think... but they continued the line into the 500+ era.

Would you like me to run anything in particular?

[Harrison]

No, I was just wondering what you could actually use it for.

[Spirantho]

Don't know what you can use it for. The usual stuff, database,spreadsheet, ruling the world, that sort of thing.

Find me some software to try.

We're waiting for your call. :)

785

Edit: Here's a starter of why it's useful...786

Just playing Stunt Car Racer now ... about 3 fps which is pretty impressive when you consider the EGA graphics are done by the Amiga CPU!

[J T]

Can it do qbasic, particularly the gorilla game?

Oh, wait I see it can't call graphics.

Er...What about Doom 3. Or Crysis?

Oh, wait.

[Spirantho]

Well, it has a pretty good go at it, actually...
787788

Incidentally, PC-Task was not free, it was shareware and then Commercial from V4 onwards. V4.4 was very good.
IBeM was another emulator for earlier Amigas, and worked quite well, possibly a bit faster.

If yours booted into a green screen, though, it was probably Transformer, Commodore's own MDA emulation. That couldn't do graphics at all, the others did.

[Puni/Void]

That's great stuff, Spirantho. I can understand that the games doesn't run properly due to the graphical capabilities. Does the hardware support an external graphic card for the Amiga? Would it take advantage of that? I assume stuff that isn't graphic intensive run fine? :)

[TheCorfiot]

I have a KCS Board in my main A500 and it uses's the GVP's FastMem too, the last software version V4.15 also gave VGA emulation.
I'm able to run Windows 3.0 in real mode with VGA but it is painfully slooooooooooooow.

[Spirantho]

@Puni/Void
I don't there were any graphics cards for the A500! There was a version for the A2000 though, which used a Zorro adaptor... but I don't think it supported RTG or anything like that.

Stuff that isn't graphics intensive does indeed run quite well.

You know the other thing that's funny with this card...? It's got an NEC chip on it. Now it's a little known fact that the NEC V30 has a Z80 mode (http://www.pageofmarco.de/v30.php has details).

That means that you could in theory change the BIOS to one that switches to Z80, and then use a new ROM to emulate a Z80 machine, using the Amiga as the graphics emulator. In other words, you could have a 10MHz Spectrum in your Amiga, or 10MHz Amstrad.... or..

Of course no-one was daft enough to actually do that, but the KCS board I reckon had the capability! I imagine it was designed this way to run CP/M originally.. but a speccy is much more fun.

Incidentally, I just came across my old emulator disks - the ST emulator (probably the one that only works if you have two drives), IBeM the PC emulator, and Transformer. Wonder how they run in UAE...hehehe...