I've been dabbling in retrogaming once again...
The last time I seriously looked at an emulator outside of MAME, was probably several years ago. However, with the impending (hopefully) demise of the AAA gaming industry, I felt like revisiting the titles of yore, and a little more besides...
Y'see, a company called CMD brought out an addon for the C64, an accelerator that they called the "SuperCPU", because that's what it was, a 65816 CPU, which was compatible with the 64's 6510 CPU, but ran at a then-blistering 20MHz. And since about 2013, the VICE Emulator has emulated this configuration. I hardly thought anything of it, until recently.
Because using the WinUAE Emulator, which emulates the Amiga family of computers, has become, over time, less and less painful, to the point that it's very little trouble (he said after spending 2 days configuring and re-configuring the bloody thing) to get a quick game of your favourite A500 title up and running.
But that's the beauty of WinUAE, and the reason that I spent 2 days testing my configurations and deleting any duplicates, because WinUAE can also be configured now, to emulate the more powerful Big-Box Amigas, such as the A4000, and even run CPU-crushing games (Such as Frontier: Elite II) and Demos (Such as The Black Lotus' show-stopping Starstruck from Assembly 2006) through emulation of higher level 68k CPUs like the 68040, and 68060. (Though I'm still working on getting that one into a usable config)
Which Brings me to my point: With ever-evolving and improving emulation, Inquiring minds could create new software that utilises the expanded hardware to create the almost impossible, First-Person Shooters on SCPU-equipped C64s, or even SCPU-equipped C128s, whose VDC chips could go above and beyond. Higher-polygon-count games and Demos on Emulated hyper-powerful Amigas, that could rival even the Playstation 2!
Of course, it's all old technology, and the fact that a mid-range Ryzen-5-3600 equipped PC can run all of this so well speaks volumes about how far computing has come in just 3 short decades.
But it's an untapped vein of creativity, and technology, and I'd be very excited to see where it goes from here.



















