After reading much about it, I finally got a chance to check out the Amiga Emulator. No I don't have a PC of my own, it's thanks to George for letting me install it onto his PC (quite a mean machine, with 233MHz Pentium II and 64MB RAM).
He had asked me about an Amiga emulator before, and so naturally I told him about UAE. What made him finally get round to installing it? An interesting tale...
There we were, surfing the web, and he decided he wanted a biplanes style game (you know the one, the old 2D shoot 'em up with, erm, biplanes in it). Maybe it's just me, but if I was going to search for an Amiga biplanes clone using a search engine (let's forget about Aminet for now...) I'd have 'Amiga' as one of the keywords, so I always think it's annoying to see PC users have no such 'platform keywords', like they're thinking no other computers exist. So naturally I was pleased to see that the number one result was an Amiga biplane clone anyway.
Somehow, this led onto trying out UAE.
Finding the UAE page is easy enough - so is finding illegal Amiga ROM images and Workbench disk images. Well, I could just have easily got an image from my machine, which wouldn't have been on at the time that the PC was running UAE. (Really though, I hope the AI do crack down on the ROM piracy, so PC users buy Amiga Forever, which means AI will get money from UAE).
To get UAE working, you need something called DirectX; it increases graphics speed under Windoze 95, or something like that. We eventually got it all set up, and used the Workbench disk image to boot up.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get disk images of the other Workbench disks to work, but thankfully, CD ROMs come to the rescue. UAE is rather neat in the way it handles CDs, as the PC's CD ROM is automatically accessable from the Amiga side; you don't need to install any Amiga drivers, or anything! So I was able to install various bits of software from CoverCDs.
I'd just like to say that it was at this moment that I wished for AmigaOS 3.5. From what AI are telling us, this release will add improvements to the OS, and make it look a lot better 'out of the box', ie, no 'grey' 4 colour Topaz font 640x256 screen as default. For the average Amiga user, with a completely altered Workbench, and a million patches running, this upgrade won't be quite so needed, but when you see the OS running in its 'untampered' original state, you wish for OS 3.5. Another advantage would be having it on CD, as installation would be easy, rather than using disk images, or scraping Workbench software from CoverCDs.
Another useful thing about UAE is that you can access the PC's hard disk, so you don't need to set aside a dedicated hard disk file or partition.
I got various bits of software running, including AWeb, and the game Poing 5 (excellent game!) I rather ambitiously tried Photogenics. It started off okay, but after the screen opened, it completely crashed, taking down the Amiga and PC side, and leaving the screen flashing various shades of green.
How does it perform? I've read that a PC of this speed should, on CPU speed, be faster than a standard A1200; it was difficult to judge the speed. Chipset stuff was a lot slower. Hard disk speed was very reasonable.
I have yet to install the Picasso96 software, but hopefully I'll get around to it. When installed ont the Amiga side, the Amiga will use the PC graphics card as if it were its own. So no more slow ECS emulation, and you instantly have huge 24 bit screens to play with!
I believe that UAE has a lot of potential in it, but I wish the CPU emulation was faster. I can put up with slow chipset emulation, as this won't matter using Picasso96 with the graphics card. Consider; a 200MHz 604e PowerMac when emulating a PC can get up to low end Pentium speeds. So a 233MHz Pentium II PC when emulation an Amiga, I would like to see at least '040 speeds (anyone know how well a PC emulates a 680x0 Mac?)
Is UAE the future of the Amiga? As I discuss elsewhere, only if it forms the basis of a porting of the AmigaOS to the Pentium processor, providing the necessary 680x0 Amiga emulation. But then long term, everything would be ported to Intel code. Looking at the other side of things, I certainly don't believe that the future of the Amiga lies only in emulating on PCs, which are primarily used for Windows applications.
Well, I recently heard about someone who received a PC for free, so he deleted Windows and everything else on the hard disk, and then installed UAE and used it as an Amiga...
Mark