My 75 MHz Pentium did reach full speed, though the emulation of the VIC-II and SID wasn't fully accurate by that point, in 1996. My 66 MHz 486 was able to come pretty close to emulating a 64 at full speed, in 1994 or so. A bridgeboard, which had a real 8088, 80286, or 386sx CPU, gave much better performance.
In the same vein, there were software PC emulators for the Amiga, but their speed was far too slow for anything more than emergency use. I didn't think highly enough of it to do anything more than try out a couple of things and then move on. SID emulation was decent VIC-II worked if the software behaved but most of the undocumented tricks didn't work well. I tried out A64 on my 0, and the emulation still wasn't as fast as the real thing. The 68000 at 7 MHz just wasn't fast enough to emulate the 6502 at acceptable speed.
I wanted to get a Mac emulator, but was never able to get the ROMs at a decent price.Ħ4 emulation was much more difficult. Apple certainly didn't want them getting into the hands of Amiga and ST owners for emulation purposes. About the only way to get them was off a junked Mac motherboard, but in those days, junked boards usually got refurbished and reused. The only thing that kept it from being more popular was the difficulty in acquiring Mac ROMs to put on the board. As I recall, it was a little faster than an equivalent Mac. Due to the early development phase there are no official releases yet.
Its rival Emplant added custom drivers for A2410, AGA, Cybervision, CyberGraphX, ECS and EGS, Merlin, OpalVision, Picasso 2, Piccolo, Retina, Spectrum and other esotechnica, but struggled to keep up with new arrivals. By now all basic functions have been implemented and the focus is shifting towards compatibility improvements. The original Amiga Mac emulator AMax stuck to mono Amiga graphics. vAmiga is a new Commodore Amiga emulator in development for MacOS. Ever.Mac emulation worked rather well, because, as you noted, the CPU architecture was the same. vAmiga: new user-friendly Amiga emulator for macOS. Having said all that, if by some miracle they can actually get this emulator to run just as well as running it on a native box, and Apple lets them do it well then, that's whole different ball game. I don't know how all that works, but I've got to believe Apple would crush this product like a grape if push comes to shove. But I just can't believe there is enough interest in, say, making sure the web page looks right on the Mac, to suport such a product.Īnother reason is licensing. Admittedly, multi-platform testing is a very legitimate use of an emulator. Kepp in mind, we Mac users typically run VPC because we HAVE to, not because we want to. Additionally, those apps tend to be for users that actually make money with them, therefore they can easily justify the expense of buying a real Mac. But you're not going to want to emulate those things. Yes, there are really compelling products/software these days for the Mac exclusively (Final Cut, iLife series, Motion, Shake, etc.).
The other reason this will never go anywhere is that there simply is no demand for this product. Or watch their video card give the emulator's OpenGL fits. To add an emulator on top of that can only mean trouble.įor example, I want to see someone use Toast via the emulator on an uber-cheap CD burner. PC users are still plagued with major headaches for such things. The emulator is able to emulate a Mac Classic or Mac II depending on the Mac ROM you use (not included). If you would like to be informed about updates concerning Amiga Forever for macOS, please enter your email address below. Apple has complete control over such things, so it's fairly easy for them to virtually guarantee compliance and operability. The Basilisk II Mac emulator allows you to emulate a 68k Macintosh on a variety of platforms, including BeOS (PowerPC and x86), Unix with X11 (including Linux, Solaris 2.5, FreeBSD and IRIX), AmigaOS 3.x, and Windows. Amiga Forever for macOS : We'll soon start working on a Mac version of Amiga Forever, inclusive of the high-quality playback and authoring functionality our customers are enjoying on Windows. The main reason being that the hardware peripheral support wil be totally out of whack (video cards, media drives, etc.).