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What Are The Odds...?

© John Chandler

It's a funny thing in the Amiga world. No sooner does one interesting thing appear from nowhere, but another interesting thing that's almost the same turns up shortly afterwards.

On Friday, I was intrigued to read about a new addition to the Amiga emulation marketplace. Until recently, Amiga emulation on the x86 PC has been a relatively sedate experience when it comes to heavy duty number crunching. Then along came the JIT (just in time) version of UAE that offered a huge improvement in performance. Now it seems we have not one, but two developments which take the emulation process a step further. The similarities are uncanny, but you know what they say - great minds think alike.

AmigaActive issue 23 presents a sneak preview of one of the two creations. Instead of the emulation running on top of a general purpose OS, such as Windows or Linux, the emulation boots directly from a small, custom OS. What OS that is remains unclear in this particular case - we only know it's not Windows or Linux. I have a couple of ideas, as I'm sure many do, but we shall have to wait and see.

In essence, it turns a standard x86 PC into a 'native' AmigaOS environment - there's no indication of whether applications can be compiled directly for x86 (as with the AROS project), only that standard 680X0 applications run fast. AmigaActive put the emulation through a suitably intensive real-life benchmark: yep, Quake. According to the figures, it even gives the PowerPC versions some serious competition, as well as the 68k version running with JIT UAE.

Of course, it's at the beta test state and lacks several intended features at the moment - such as AGA emulation, audio (AHI compatible) and printer and joystick support. Still, you do get TCP/IP networking and CacheCDFS for CD-ROM support as part of the current release.

Then we come to the AmiWest 2001 announcement just a couple of days later... and find we have a twin. Bernd Mayer (author of the JIT UAE software) and Harald Frank of VMC make an announcement for their "Amithlon" project. Again, the idea is the same - have a small, custom OS boot the emulation to give you a 'native' system with better emulation performance. In this case, the OS is a modified Linux kernel which means the emulation uses standard Linux drivers to access hardware present on the PC. (Before any GPL comments come into play, take a look at the unofficial FAQ listed at the bottom of the

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