Hardware PC Emulators

[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.

IMAG0215.jpg

Edit: Here's a starter of why it's useful...IMAG0217.jpg

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...
IMAG0218.jpgIMAG0219.jpg

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...