| From: | Nick Lamburn |
| Date: | 7 Jun 2000 at 15:51:43 |
| Subject: | Re: UFO AGA / RTG = Zero |
Hi Gary
> Bugger, but I thought that there was a version of Amiga Forever that had
> AGA support. This is one that has always puzzled me, and I guess someone
> on the list will be able to answer my question, but how come there has
> never been any form of AGA emulation for Amigas with GFX cards ? I guess
> that this would result in some form of hit to the processor so a 68040
> ECS box couldn't actually emulate a AGA box with the same processor, but
> surely it must be possible to implement the solution in software to some
> degree.
A fine idea, emulation of AGA via RTG. Some difficulties though. However
it is indeed possible to a certain extent to mimic AGA's 7 and 8 plane
screen support (128 and 256 colours) OS wise. That'd be easy. But AGA is
more than that, with a faster Blitter (a device that copies memory about to
different locations in sometimes fancy ways), the enhanced Copper. Simply
put - yes a great idea. But it sadly won't work because remember the Amiga
has a lot of custom hardware not even found on any RTG card, which means it
boils down to the CPU. Can you see why UAE is slow if the real custom chips
are not present. Not to mention Direct Memory Access (DMA) limitations, and
the fact that ECS/OCS chipsets are 16BITs, not 32BITs. In a way - it's akin
to trying to fit a boulder through a needle's eye! ;)
Maybe I'm wrong, I dunno - but that's the way I see it, unfortunately.
Someone correct me, I'm probably wrong :))
Regards
Nick.
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