5 ms·

This is very cool. The first thing I did was to click on Frontier: Elite II, seeing as how I grew up with it on the Amiga and now I play Elite: Dangerous. To

This is very cool. The first thing I did was to click on Frontier: Elite II, seeing as how I grew up with it on the Amiga and now I play Elite: Dangerous. To be emulating the Amiga in a browser is rather impressive, although it naturally does have a few drawbacks. Some comments/observations... The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you). The actual emulation within the browser was slow on my machine at least (An ageing AMD Phenom II X4, and using Google Chrome) - the frame rate is noticeably slower than the Real Deal running on original metal [again, it's an emulation therefore understandable]). The sound is very very close - although if you scroll up and down the page a bit you notice the sound slows down (again understandable - you're probably stealing execution cycles from the emulator when doing this). The full screen icon did nothing. The sound icon did nothing except bring up a message window telling me it only did something if the emulator was running - even when the emulator is running. Verdict: An impressive feat to be running old Amiga games in a browser, but at least on my system speed improvements, feedback on what is happening whilst it sets up the emulation environment and game, and having the full-screen and sound icons work properly, is desirable.

s-macke 10y ago
Try to play Frontier: Elite II on http://www.jor1k.com http://www.jor1k.com. When it finished booting just open the menu by typing "help" and then choose Elite in the graphic games menu. Change to 30 frames per second. This way it runs smooth on my system. The version in jor1k ran through several transformation steps. It uses the Atari version of Frontier written in Assembler. Then Tom Morton wrote a 68k to C converter for this game (https://tom.noflag.org.uk/glfrontier.html https://tom.noflag.org.uk/glfrontier.html). This was compiled to OpenRISC machine code which is then emulated by jor1k. The fact that this runs faster then the Amiga emulator shows, that they have still have a lot of work to do.
- scarygliders 10y ago
  I just tried it. The frame rate was still sub-optimal. It may be time to upgrade my motherboard and CPU - the Phenom II X4 is really starting to show its age these days :)
  - s-macke 10y ago
    The games needs about 130 MIPS in the emulation. If it runs at that speed you have to adjust the frame rate in the dropdown menu. But the main problem is the keyboard emulation. Frontier needs the shift key to slowdown the spaceship. And there is no way in JavaScript to get the keydown and keyup events for this key.
  - s-macke 10y ago
    Hmm, looks like I am wrong. The shift key is recognized by JavaScript.
db48x 10y ago
> The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you). This would be an interesting area of research. Once we fire up the emulator, it starts drawing to its screen buffer (which is an HTML5 canvas). What you see is presumably exactly what you would see on the original machine (sadly, I never had an Amiga myself). You see the workbench, possibly some messages in it from the software, then the software takes over the screen and starts drawing pretty pictures. In between, a lot of these things seem to blank the screen, turning it black or grey, or filling it with noise. Providing meaningful and accurate feedback on top of that would be a fun application of computer vision, but it could turn out to be a difficult problem in the general case. Thanks for mentioning the fullscreen button, I hadn't noticed that it was broken; I'll see if I can fix it. Muting is a horror show, because MAME and DosBox don't yet support it. SAE does though, so we'll work on it next.
- hansjorg 10y ago
  One option for better feedback is to add indicators for floppy and hard drive activity, like the leds on the original Amigas. Some emulators even emulate the sound of the physical fdd :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc
  - db48x 10y ago
    Indeed, a disk activity indicator is actually an option now with SAE. It'll probably take a bit longer to do correctly, as it will touch more of the page than just the canvas.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  If you can get the current instruction pointer of the emulated CPU and compare it to a system memory map (or just previous runs of the same ROM and software), you could probably create a progress bar. No computer vision required ;).
  - 10y ago
billpg 10y ago
I wonder what happens when it asks you to type in a word from the manual.

s-macke 10y ago

Try to play Frontier: Elite II on http://www.jor1k.com http://www.jor1k.com. When it finished booting just open the menu by typing "help" and then choose Elite in the graphic games menu. Change to 30 frames per second. This way it runs smooth on my system. The version in jor1k ran through several transformation steps. It uses the Atari version of Frontier written in Assembler. Then Tom Morton wrote a 68k to C converter for this game (https://tom.noflag.org.uk/glfrontier.html https://tom.noflag.org.uk/glfrontier.html). This was compiled to OpenRISC machine code which is then emulated by jor1k. The fact that this runs faster then the Amiga emulator shows, that they have still have a lot of work to do.

scarygliders 10y ago
I just tried it. The frame rate was still sub-optimal. It may be time to upgrade my motherboard and CPU - the Phenom II X4 is really starting to show its age these days :)
- s-macke 10y ago
  The games needs about 130 MIPS in the emulation. If it runs at that speed you have to adjust the frame rate in the dropdown menu. But the main problem is the keyboard emulation. Frontier needs the shift key to slowdown the spaceship. And there is no way in JavaScript to get the keydown and keyup events for this key.
- s-macke 10y ago
  Hmm, looks like I am wrong. The shift key is recognized by JavaScript.

db48x 10y ago

> The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you). This would be an interesting area of research. Once we fire up the emulator, it starts drawing to its screen buffer (which is an HTML5 canvas). What you see is presumably exactly what you would see on the original machine (sadly, I never had an Amiga myself). You see the workbench, possibly some messages in it from the software, then the software takes over the screen and starts drawing pretty pictures. In between, a lot of these things seem to blank the screen, turning it black or grey, or filling it with noise. Providing meaningful and accurate feedback on top of that would be a fun application of computer vision, but it could turn out to be a difficult problem in the general case. Thanks for mentioning the fullscreen button, I hadn't noticed that it was broken; I'll see if I can fix it. Muting is a horror show, because MAME and DosBox don't yet support it. SAE does though, so we'll work on it next.

hansjorg 10y ago
One option for better feedback is to add indicators for floppy and hard drive activity, like the leds on the original Amigas. Some emulators even emulate the sound of the physical fdd :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc
- db48x 10y ago
  Indeed, a disk activity indicator is actually an option now with SAE. It'll probably take a bit longer to do correctly, as it will touch more of the page than just the canvas.
nitrogen 10y ago
If you can get the current instruction pointer of the emulated CPU and compare it to a system memory map (or just previous runs of the same ROM and software), you could probably create a progress bar. No computer vision required ;).
- 10y ago

billpg 10y ago

I wonder what happens when it asks you to type in a word from the manual.