MikeB on 22 November 2008
@ crumas2
In the mid-80's I was a huge Amiga fan and remember the period with a smile. That machine was definitely ahead of its time, capability wise.
The problem was that the architecture wasn't easily scalable like the PC/Mac architectures.
Of course it was, you could upgrade 80s high end Amigas in the 90s with graphics cards which used the same chips as their PC or Mac equivalents. Classic Amigas can even be upgraded to run AmigaOS4.x from 2008.
Amigas from the 80s could be upgraded like no PC or Mac from this era could.
By the 90's, a middle of the road PC could emulate in software all the customized hardware in the Amiga several times over, without breaking a sweat.
Emulation was nothing new, Amigas emulated x86 PCs right from the beginning. In the 90s you could emulate a 68k Mac faster than an equivalently specced Mac, the fastest "68k Mac" was in fact an Amiga which unlike the Mac could multi-task, running several 68k Macs simultaneously through a software emulator.
Amiga emulation didn't become feasible long after Commodore went out of business (due to losses to their PC branch and after that a patent hold-up preventing them to sell launch stock for the United States).
Cuirrently we use WinUAE to emulate classic Amigas which is based on UAE. UAE stands for UNIX Amiga Emulator, although the "U" originally stood for "Unusable" as in 1996 on a 90Mhz Pentium the emulation was still about one third as fast as a 7 MHz A1000 from 1985.
To put things into proper perspective.
