Amiga emulation
Posted by moggen on March 31, 2008
I’m working on a project with a friend of mine. We are building an emulator of an Amiga system.
You might wonder why, there exists very good emulators already out there like UAE. The thing with UAE and similar emulators is that it emulates the complete hardware as an enclosed virtual machine running totally separated from the host machine. Our idea is to be able to just run Amiga applications directly not requiring the whole emulated machine.
The AROS AmigaOS replacement does not emulate the hardware and is compiled directly to native code on the host computer. AROS emulates the whole operating system, and it requires that all applications is compiled for the native CPU.
We want to be able to run the old MC68000 Amiga binaries, as many of the old applications are closed source. We want to be able to run the binaries on an Intel CPU too, and we don’t want to start a complete operating system virtual machine every time we run an application.
To accomplish this we need a CPU emulation combined with an AmigaOS simulator. We only want to simulate the parts of AmigaOS that is needed for a specific application and that is the challenge. The first goal is to be able to run simple console applications.
We are working on a first release and I will post here when it is time for that. We have chosen not to base our project on other open source code but to create everything from scratch, but the plan is still to release under the GPL license.
Håkan Fröing said
Even thougt that I don’t share the intrest for yore goal I must emit that I admire yore comitment and yore determiation to complete this project.
Keep up the good work =)