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> Finally, one of Commodore’s big selling points for Amiga was PC compatibility: One of the pieces of launch software was official Amiga-badged PC XT emulation
by chipotle_coyote 6y ago
> Finally, one of Commodore’s big selling points for Amiga was PC compatibility: One of the pieces of launch software was official Amiga-badged PC XT emulation software, and one of the pieces of launch hardware was a 5.25in PC-compatible floppy drive.
I had to go hunting for this one; I didn't remember the Amiga 1000 launching with a software PC emulator, but I found what you were referring to, "Amiga Transformer"! But I confess I definitely don't remember it being a "big selling point", perhaps because from the reports I can find, it was absolute shit, running at the equivalent of 0.3 MHz.
What I remember was the slightly later hardware "emulator" for it called the Sidecar; I put "emulator" in quotes because it was, well, basically a complete PC XT clone.
- ChainOfFools 6y agoit was mostly a bandaid of hype to tide people over until the Amiga Sidecar was ready, which was essentially a full 8086 pc in an add on box. IIRC it used some rather expensive dual-port ram as the interface between the two systems by which the PC side's display and basic I/O could be merged into the Amiga UI. This later became the rather more elegant full ISA compatible Bridgeboard used in the 2000 series Amigas. I am fairly sure a comparable x86 software emulation solution existed for the contemporary Mac of the days, called MacCharlie, which like the software-based Amiga Transformer was useless for anything other than a proof of concept demo.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoWhile I didn't remember the name MacCharlie, I found the Wikipedia article and the description kind of rang a bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCharlie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCharlie As it turns out, it's a hardware device more like the Sidecar, except from the description much worse. :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]