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|1-The Amiga is Dead


|1-Long Live the Amiga


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                                by D!ck
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Okay, people will moan about the title and how I'm a traitor having gone
over  to the PC and what have you, but I hope they read this article and
take on board the comments herein.

Most  people  by  now  will  have heard of UAE, the Unix Amiga Emulator.
What  started  out  as a pet project that wouldn't even boot (and so was
called  the  Unusable  Emulator) has suddenly turned into a very serious
developement  indeed.   UAE  has been ported to many different platforms
(even  the Amiga!), it is the first time that such a powerful and multi-
tasking machine has been emulated to such an astounding degree.

               T·H·E  D·I·F·F·E·R·E·N·T  V·E·R·S·I·O·N·S

No matter what machine you use, there seems to be a version of UAE ready
to  run  on  your  machine.   It  was  originally written for Unix-based
machines (hence the title) but the full list looks like this:

    ---------------------------------------------------------------
    Author:                                 Platform:
    ---------------------------------------------------------------
    Markus Gietzen                          SGI (Silicon Graphics)
    Ed Hanway                               SGI
    Marcus Sundberg                         DEC Alpha
    Samuel Mackrill                         AIX/RS6000
    Dirk Vangestel                          SunOS
    Thorsten Frueauf                        NetBSD
    Ernesto Corvi                           Mac
  * Gustavo Goedert                         MS-DOS
  * Christian Bauer                         BeBox
    Ian Stephenson                          NeXT
    Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel                    Amiga
    Krister Bergman                         XFree86/OS2
    Mathias Ortmann                         Windows32/DirectX
    ---------------------------------------------------------------
  * (extra help not mentioned)

Most  people  have PC's and so will have seen the MS-DOS version of UAE,
it  runs from a simple text-based front end allowing you to configure it
for  any amount of RAM, four disk drives and varios Harddisk sizes.  You
can  mount  devices  such  as  the  PC Floppy drive, the CD unit or even
another  harddrive  that you have connected, and all of them can be used
by  the  emulator.  DosUAE (as it is known) is probably the most popular
and most used version of the emulator.

However,  if you have a decent PC setup and have invested money in a Gfx
card that supports DirectX (a series of high-speed routines intended for
giving  games  programmers  easy  access  to the hardware) then the last
version  on the above list - WinUAE as it is known - would probably be a
damned  sight  faster,  as  all the drawing of straight lines (as in the
GUI's for Workbench and other utilities) is dramatically speeded up.

                       W·H·Y  T·H·E  A·M·I·G·A·?

People  have  often  asked  why  there  is  a version for the Amiga.  It
doesn't  seem  logical to emulate a machine on the machine itself, given
that  it  will mean losses in speed, storage and RAM space.  However, if
you  run some kind of Amiga clone (like the Draco 060) then a lot of the
Amiga  hardware - the blitter and sound chips - will not be available to
you  and you won't be able to run Amiga games.  Using the emulator gives
you  -  effectively  -  an  A500+,  and your monster Amiga clone is fast
enough to run it without too many problems.

The  biggest problem, however, is the inability of PC floppy controllers
to read Amiga-formatted floppy disks.  However, mention has been made of
a  new floppy controller card for the PC called the Catweasle, which can
apparently  handle  this very task.  Whether this is true or not remains
to be seen and the cost-effectiveness may be doubtful.

Whatever  you  think,  it  means that the Amiga has lost an awful lot of
credibility, simply because it has been - the dreaded E-word - Emulated.
Once  a  computer has been sucessfully emulated there is less demand for
it  in  true  hardware form, and with it being ported chiefly to so many
incredibly powerful machines, the future looks grim indeed.

On  the  other  hand,  it now means that more and more people are seeing
AmigaDOS  for the first time and how a multitasking machine should work,
albeit  with a few restrictions, mainly due to everything being entirely
handled  by  software,  which may turn out to be a good thing if the new
PPC-based  Amigas  really take off and are sporting Workbench 4.  We can
only wait and see.

D!ck

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[I  have DosUAE and it is soooo slow!  Even on a P133 it's not worth the
effort  so I still have my Amiga as well as my 2 PC's as they just don't
come close.  Kei]

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