Amiga Emulator for ARM Boards | Hacker News Reader

Amiga Emulator for ARM Boards

github.com

77 pointsdoener12 comments

I have a Pi 400 that netboots directly into Amiberry, turning it into a kind of new Amiga.

Quick zero-effort video about it here: https://youtu.be/lzw-RyMPLqc

I did try Amibian but I think it doesn't support the Pi 400. Even on a supported Pi I had some issues with it, I think it's quite out of date.

When I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 4 to run 64-bit, the emulator I'd been using -- uae4arm -- didn't really support 64-bit compilation. Amiberry to the rescue.

There's also Amibian, which is precompiled distro that simply boots seamlessly into an Amiga emulator. For those who don't want to faff about with compiling or configuring Amiga emulation on their Pi.

https://www.amibian.org/

I can't work out what's going on from that site. The tutorial and download sections seem like a placeholder, and the github link is dead, with the user having no related project (publicly).

I found this but it is quite old:

https://github.com/Amibian/amibian

[edit] this is better - https://gunkrist79.wixsite.com/amibian

Speaking of true amiga experience, one thing I can’t seem to find are 8520 CIA chips for my A500 and A2000. I’m surprised no one ever made an fpga replacement for those chips or those amiga patent holders never cared to do another fab run. Fabs are much cheaper now and considering how many active amiga project there are right now, I’m sure there would be a good market for that, instead of wasting good boards just for prying out chips. If anyone has any insight about that, I’m sure a lot of amgians here would like to know!

https://1nt3r.net/j-cia/ ?

I don't think you will see new custom chips made to match those chips, however they are small enough to be easy to implement in a modern CPLD/FPGA.

I know of three such projects at the moment:

J-CIA: https://1nt3r.net/j-cia/

FBI: https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/84273-wip-fbi-als-er...

VHDL6526: https://github.com/bwack/VHDL6526

The 6526 CIA from the C64/128 is almost identical to the 8520 from the Amiga, the only difference is in the time-of-day clock registers. The 6526 uses BCD encoded TOD, the Amiga 8520 counts seconds since midnight.

All ARM Amiga emulators (based on cutdown/modified UAE) are inaccurate and exhibit glitches to various degrees which in some cases can be ok but in others a degraded experience and very far from the real thing.

If fidelity is what you're after, go for WinUAE (THE reference in software emulation) or get a MiSTer (assuming that you don't want to get an actual Amiga).

Is this for some fundamental reason, or is it just that they're lacking polish because they've seen less development effort so far?

Performance, there's not enough juice to be as accurate as WinUAE. Also, running on top of Linux is worse than Windows since things like lagless beam racing vsync that are needed for perfect/smooth 50fps are (in practice, taking into account drivers, X and so on) very hard to impossible on Linux.

Do any emulators parallelise and emulate the individual custon chips? One thing about the Amiga was how smooth the double buffering was.

All emulators emulate the custom chips, to varying degrees of accuracy depending on emulator and available CPU power. Cycle-exact Amiga emulation is very CPU intensive. There is no parallelization.

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