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What Amitari wrote in the comments of this prod made me think...

Well, let me quote and comment the things he said:


Maybe it's just me, but, to me, the whole purpose of having a real machine is to watch the prods for that machine ON that machine. Or, at least, that's part of the reason for having that machine. Yes, I prefer native hardware to emulators (this doesn't mean I own native hardware - it just means that I prefer it). Now, I can follow Amitari in regards to the convenience of the whole thing, but I just feel there's something very, very wrong about the world, when convenience takes over - what is left? What is shifted towards the losing side of this battle?
I agree with Amitari here, to some extend. However, isn't it great to at least code on the real thing? I'm no coder, so I wouldn't know, but being as close as possible to real hardware would be somewhat an inspiration for me, if I was a coder, I'd imagine...

So the emulator decides whether the production is a gem, or not? So, if the production doesn't run on an emulator, it's not worth checking out on real hardware? Come on, man. I think Amitari is stepping on thin ice here. He could potentially be missing out on some great productions. Should the ability to run on an emulator be part of the judging of a production these days?

I wouldn't know about the Falcon being a great machine or not, but somewhat thinking it's a shame it hasn't got an emulator, in context what he wrote above, really made me think whether emulators are good or bad. What do YOU think?

i think i want to be able to watch the falcon demos without having to wait for someone to extract a video with a pair of blunt pliers. so go do an emulator please.

ps: Sure, if you don't own a Falcon, an emulator is better than a video - but that was not really my point...

falcons arent that common, and i dont see people owning all machines in existant in working state and mod'ed to transfer stuff from pc and all that jazz. so yes, emulators the more the merrier plskthx

Hatari has limited Falcon emulation.
For myself, I mostly stick to emulation as well, as I don't have my machines set up constantly (considering I have ike 10 different ones I follow [going from VIC-20 to Falcon 060]).
If a production really kicks ass or doesn't work on an emulator, chances are high, that I'll watch them on the real thing.

Yey for Falcon emulator. No, sceners shouldn't stop producing demos till they make emulator. No, of course he didn't meaned that if a demo does not run in emulator it's not worth watching. He meaned to take a first preview of released falcon prods fast on emul before deciding to watch on real thing (for this purpose, review or streamed video should suffice though)

If I owned a real Falcon I wouldn't be so needy for an emulator, still I would find one important for the presentation of history and show off falcon scene.

I code on emulator or cross-developing tools and test on the real thing. I don't have the luxury of time any more to run the assembler on CPC from disk, that eats my memory alone, except if I am doing small things for fun.

optimus: you meant to say meant instead of meaned. meaned doesnt exist as a word.

All valid points and pretty much what I anticipated.
As real hardware becomes scarce, emulators will take over more and more. But will it lead to a righteous preservation of what was left behind, will it be an improvement, an enviroment that will blossom and expand, of will it fade and vanish?
I'm just wondering....

Optimus: I don't know Amitari good enough to read between the lines. I read what he writes and passes judgment on that. He wrote that if a production is good enough in an emulator, he might watch it on the real thing. I concluded that he felt if a prod didn't run in an emulator it wasn't worth exploring on real hardware. I see no "of course" in what he wrote - which basically was the reason for starting this thread, mind you.

I do the same on amiga-prods. checks in uae first. it is a lot of hasle to copy stuff to the Amiga so it would be a shame to do it for no reason.

i believe that would be the awesome opportunity of sitting in a bus full of sceners al the way to breakpoint.

skrebbel: hahaha :D

skrebble: last time i thought in those terms i was the first person puking at the partyplace. prepartying waiting for the bus aint a good idea to follow on an empty stomach.

Ok, touché - you dutch bastard ;)

As much as I'd prefer to watch stuff on actual hardware, it's just not worth it most of the time considering what you need to do. To put things in perspective, here's what I'd have to do to get a demo onto one of my amigas (none of which have a network card):

Get the amiga down from the loft, along with a TV (I don't have space to keep it permanently out)
Download the demo onto a USB stick on my mac
Get out and plug in my ancient PC laptop and put the USB stick in (the mac has no parallel port)
Network the laptop and amiga through parallel and copy the demo to disk on the amiga (actually it falls down here, as I don't have a disk with the parallel network stuff on for amiga except on CD, so I'd also have to modify the amiga PSU and find an IDE adaptor to get a CD drive working!)

Considering that, I think emulators are great. If you have old hardware that can load up demos fairly easily (like if that amiga had a hard disk and was on the net) then sure, you watch it on the original machine, but most times it's just not worth it.

<off-topic> psonice: If your ancient laptop has a floppy drive you could probably use 720k disks to transfer the stuff, there's r/w on msdos disks on amiga. You need to have that capabillity on the Amiga in first place of course :)

Doesn't most AGA Amigas also have an ATAPI CD-ROM attached?

[/quote]
I agree with Amitari here, to some extend. However, isn't it great to at least code on the real thing?
[/quote]
Try that on a GB/GBC/GBA. :)
Besides that, I like running stuff on the real hardware too. Emulators have their advantages though...

I simply adore my engrish.

Hey what about guys like me? Who've never seen a Falcon before?

This is why emulators are great. Lately I've been checking out the C64 scene, and I really like it. How could that be possible without an emulator?

If I've never even seen a Falcon (it's a machine older than I am I'm sure) how am I supposed to code for one? I'll tell you - an emulator. I mean, sure, I'd rather have the real thing. But i can see the convenience of using an emulator to develop something first before using it on the real thing - there's probably better error-checking on an emulator (where an actual model would crash, maybe an emulator could tell where a problem occurred). Also, if you code for like 10 different machines, that's alot of desk space and electricity to keep all those running, where you could just get all the emulators.

My view is a totally outsider's perspective, but I think I have some valid points in there.

Nutman: Today coding environment is light years better than coding on the real hw with old tools. much better to have a contemporary tool, cross compile and test in the emulator.
You're not actually coding in the emulator anyway (most likely) - it just enables you to work faster and better.

So, whoever, write a good emulator for your Falcon and we'll be happy too ;)

Nutman, re. the 'watching it on an emulator first' thing; there's literally only a handfull of Atari ST prods that don't work 100% correctly on current emulators.

That's entirely wrong. I've seen no emulator that shows anything 100% correctly. Simply because they only show 384 or 400 pixels width, while the ST/e display 416 in overscan. So they all show a cropped image. Very annoying when coding fullscreens using an emulator. But still, I've gone over to using Xcode + Hatari for coding ST things, which I hate to admit is more comfortable in the long run.

Yes, thats entirely wrong! No emulator, even a good one like STeem shows stuff 100%. Atari emulators still aren't at the stage where you can release something without testing it on real hardware first - and frankly is any emulator for a retro machine?

Just to add to what Evil says, sound is certinally wrong - YM2149 is noticeably different, no one emulated the microwire properly, and DMA sound is not played back at quite the same rate - if you listen its out of tune.

Nevertheless, windows notepad + steem is my setup for coding.

Evil is 100% correct in my opinion.

There's one thing i don't like:
"Your demo doesn't run properly on the emulator, so it sucks."

I code on the original machine for the original machine. If an emulator runs it well, that's fine by me.
If it does not, don't blame the demo.

el-topo: Like you say, I need ms-dos support on the amiga first.. plus enough stuff to be able to extract the files to somewhere and write them back to disk. I really need to get a hard disk in the a1200, but the chances of getting time to do it is pretty much zero, it's way down my priority list. (And if anyone else is thinking of doing that... go make a demo instead ;)

Nutman: I don't think any amigas (at least in the 'real' amiga times) had a cdrom, except the cd32. Maybe the a4000, but that was hardly a common machine. The AGA machines had a single 2.5 inch IDE port though, so they could take an internal laptop size hard disk. With a 2.5" -> 3.5" adaptor you can put in a hard disk and cdrom, although you then have to power it somehow.

I seem to remember that I used a PC PSU, and cut the motherboard connector off, then soldered the wires directly to the a1200 board. Ugly, but it worked. Actually, it was damn ugly.. the motherboard didn't fit into the pc case I bought, so I had to tape it to the outside :)