Emulator or Real Computer?

[Amiga Forever]

Emulator = Is good for someone who doesnt have space in their Room

Real Computer= Someone who have Huge Space as like having own museum or prefer have real hardware

Would love hear your view thought


Agree or disagree?

 

[User4703]

There are certain things that I can't get away with on original hardware (esp the Amiga) these days and chief among them are the loading delays.

This is where the turbo speed emulator disk drives are a great addon as are the graphics filters for rendering.

Admittedly, the price you pay is a less than authentic experience but that's the way it is.

I've been looking at the Xbox recently and it appears to be a great all in one solution for a wide variety of platforms so may have to invest in one of them soon enough.

 

[soeter04]

I think rkauer can chime in with his famous quote...

For me, i live in a pretty small apartment, but that did not stop me collecting consoles. Even though emulators (at least some of them) come very very close to the real thing in terms of function, it does not compare to actually playing games on the real hardware in my opinion

 

[cheezmonkey]

MY good buddy and I did a 30 hour charity gaming marathon last august, www.facebook.com/30in30marathon if you want to check it out. Rule number one, before we'd even settled on the games list was no emulation.

It's. Just. Not. The. Same.

 

[freehand]

I swing both ways.

 

[Bryce]

If all you are interested in is the picture / game on the screen then you should be happy enough with an emulator, but for me Retro Computing is about the smell of the computer, the feel of the keyboard, the click of the floppy drive, connecting it all up and so much more. None of these can be emulated.

Besides, as a hardware developer, emulators aren't all that useful to me.

Bryce. (No emulators in my house)

 

[roy_bates]

simple answer from me,real hardware ftw.

---------- Post added at 15:07 ---------- Previous post was at 15:06 ----------

I swing both ways.

interesting,i think i know where this comment is going

 

[cheezmonkey]

It's just never quite right.

I remember back when the Nintendo Wii was in development and they announced that they would be selling legacy games to run on it with emulation. I figured being official they would do a bang-up job of it. But I was wrong. Sure the graphics, sound and framerate are for the most part as near as I Can tell spot on, but the button lag is absolutely hideous. The number of times I, for example, just run into a pit without jumping on <any given Mario game> is too high to count.

Sonic 1, on the mega drive, I can finish the first level in 28 seconds on the real MD (yeah, not a world record, but I'm quite proud of that) but the best I have ever managed on any emulated version is 30.

 

[fitzsteve]

I prefer to game on the original hardware where possible but Emulation is a real luxury for certain things, especially in Amiga world for setting up drives, etc.

If you can't afford a top of the range 060 PPC Amiga setup you can emulate a pimped out OS3.9 on any PC of the last 5-10 years at decent speed, of course there's no PPC emulation yet for Amiga but the 68k ports run like the proverbial off a shovel in WinUAE and the emulation is near to perfect these days thanks to Toni Willen still working on it.

You might think it strange but I also use my Amiga's to emulate other systems, the main ones are Mac (ShapeShifter as I don't own any Mac's here) and Spectrum. Of course I own several speccy's but not setup and ready to play, if I want a quick blast I can play via an Amiga and it's as near as makes no difference to the real thing as I'm playing with a regular Joystick and on a normal TV/Monitor.

As for shapeshifter, there are a lot of Games that work better than there Amiga counter parts, for example, Theme Park & Sim City 2000, I used to play Wolfenstein 3D a lot but that has since been ported to Amiga by Novacoder.

I must admit, when it comes to retro consoles I don't really emulate them on the computer at all, I have a couple of hand held devices that I use for portable emulation though. Mame I emulate on the PC when I want to play, but often I just head for the console ports. I do have a Neo Geo MVS for my Metal Sluggin' tho

Otherwise I have the consoles here and ready to play via my Projector or my new Sony PVM, for the rare and expensive games you can always invest in an Everdrive, I have one for my Megadrive and it plays SMS/MD and 32x Games

Strangely I still have a collection of over 50 games for the Megadrive! And over 150 for Snes/N64. A nice 40+ HuCard's for PC Engine, 100's of Saturn/Dreamcast,Mega CD etc. Oh and 75+ for Sega Master System, another system that emulates really well on the Amiga (using a CD32 pad)

Anyway, as you can see I enjoy both

 

[cheezmonkey]

Actually Steve, you're right about emulating Amiga for setup and config. I've done a lot of that over the last couple of months.

Wouldn't dream of playing a game on it mind you

I've been toying with a bit of a project lately - I won a fairly useless Android netbook at my local arcade (12000 tickets in one visit, bitches!) and it has sat, practically unused in a drawer for a few months, until I found this site...

I'm gradually and with very limited success getting it setup as a portable Amiga. There's an Android version of UAE which seems to work pretty reasonably but I've been having trouble getting a WB environment setup on it. Might need to call upon smarter people than I to help there. I think it'll be pretty good when it's finished though.

 

[fitzsteve]

Hey cheezmonkey, you mean UAE4All?

I use this on my JXD Android Pad, it works well and I just used a HDF from Classic Workbench

That works fine inc WHDLoad Games

Performance, well keep your expectations set to 'medium' and you will be happy.

 

[sir_beaker]

Oh real hardware all the time. I don't think I've got one emulator installed on any of my machines. Most of the fun is hunting down these old machines, admiring their design (or lack of in some cases), interacting with it, and in some cases, having people fix them up when needs be so they can be enjoyed by future generations.

No matter how good the emulator is I find them soulless.

 

[cheezmonkey]

Hey cheezmonkey, you mean UAE4All?

I'm using UAE4Droid and it's being a real pain actually. Damn thing won't "POST" for lack of a better description with anything other than the most basic of hardware configs. I have a 3.1 ROM on there, but pretty much anything other than a 68000 with 1mb just shows a black screen.

I'll check out UAE4All though as I haven't had a lot of success so far. I tried building an HD image on WinUAE and moving it over, but that won't start either.

 

[fitzsteve]

lookie here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=71330

 

[User4703]

I use this on my JXD Android Pad, it works well and I just used a HDF from Classic Workbench

Which specification JXD do you have? Is it the new quad core? I'm only interested in gaming A500 stuff but it must be smooth with no frameskip.

 

[fitzsteve]

Hi SherlockHomeless,

I have the original S7300, to be honest it's a bit flaky as with most Android tablets. The software is never 100% I find on top of that I'm using custom NCCE firmware so this might bring some instabilities.

If you jack the CPU up to full speed it should be smooth but I think the sound stutters, I'll have a play later and report back.

I use it mostly for Sega MD, N64, Mame and some Android Games. I was also using it for XBMC but for some reason that has stopped working, it will no longer fine my UpNP server on my FreeNAS box

This is what I mean by flaky!

For the money it's a great device but I had higher expectations, perhaps the new version is better?

 

[Paradroid90]

Apart from my PS2 and XBOX all other console based goodness I might need is emulated on the XBox Original I have set up.

The only computer set up I have emulated now is (Please don’t shoot me :wooha is an amiga. icard

Starting using FS-UAE on my mint desktop and it is rock solid.

Eventually want to have a minimal Arch install with FS-UAE booting straight from Grub and AROS running on the other partition

One of many projects I have shelved at present

But with the 64,Beeb,Atari 8 Bit, STE,Plus 4,C128 and soon to be Amstrad 6128 I only use original hardware.

 

[fitzsteve]

@SherlockHomeless

As I type XBMC has fixed it's self and I had a play with UAE4All linked above.

In A500 mode from ADF it's smooth with 0 frame skip but the first two Games I tried had glitches, Lotus 2 wouldn't start, green screen, and Lotus 1 played full screen but the bottom screen was glitching.

I then played Pang, it worked fine but the sound was poor and some stutters, the game play was 100% smooth though.

I tried Lotus 2 via WHDLoad on an A1200/8mb setup via Workbench, it ran but quite slow, maybe the extra power on the Quad Core model would handle WHDLoad better, I seem to remember playing games this was before, perhaps I used frame skip.

 

[ShambleS1980]

i think im strange..

i have no issues emulating consoles.. to me 1 console is as same as the other.

but i wouldnt emulate an amiga or an st..

 

[User4703]

@fitzsteve - thanks for that, I thought that's how it would be. I can't stand flaky emulation, so I'll give that tech a miss until it's moved forward a bit.