First post, by FeedingDragon
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- Oldbie
Moderator note: Split off from an GPL license discussion.
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wrote:It's also the slowest platform where the fastest CPU is a 50mhz 68060. Porting DOSBox to such platform doesn't really make much sense. Unless you enjoy a lot of stuttering, of course.
With a PPC excelerator card, Amiga's can get much faster than 50mhz. Those usually come with a PPC processor that is much faster, but can only be used my software that is designed to use it. DOSBox compiled to use the PPC could actually accomplish something 😀 Sure, the fastest PPC accelerator I know of is only 233mhz, but if you are only wanting to emulate software designed to run at 25mhz at the fastest..... Ok, some of the more modern DOS based games are designed to run faster (Tomb Raider comes to mind.) But for the older stuff, there shouldn't be a problem.
Also, and I'm not sure how much this would effect DOSBox, most games I've found that have both PC & Amiga versions run better & with lower requirements on the Amiga than they do on the PC. As an example, Ultima VI ran alot smoother on my stock A2000 (7mhz w/1 meg memory,) than it did on my 486 system (25mhz w/16 meg memory.) Up until the last couple of years, my A4000 (25mhz w/18 meg memory + Picasso IV graphics card,) has outperformed any PC I had. The first PC I had that did better was my first P4 system (1.8ghz w/512 meg memory.) The only reason I used my PCs more was because they had more support, and it is a lot cheaper to upgrade than my Amiga. Of course, there isn't much more upgrading I can do with my Amiga. After around 1993 or so (not sure of the exact year,) they pretty much stopped porting games over to the Amiga. I remember how upset I got when I discovered that X-Wing didn't have (and never would have,) an Amiga version.
I've never been all that clear on why the disparity between the 2 systems. What did the Amiga have that allowed it to run rings around the PC? If the source code was altered to be Amiga specific (take advantage of whatever this was,) would DOSBox actually run better & more efficiently on the Amiga than it does on the PC? Unless an Amiga programmer decides to really work with DOSBox, the world may never know 🙁
Feeding Dragon