Ethical Companies – The Blog

Following on from yesterday’s post about emulation here’s part #2 discussing emulation of 16 bit computer systems. You know the ones I mean: The Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, amongst others.

Years ago when Amiga was first released there was a lot of debate about whether to buy the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga; it was the Commodore 64 vs Sinclair Spectrum battle all over again …. Commodore’s offering was the first multi tasking offering on the market and technically a superior machine to the Atari offering with superior graphics and sound. Many Commodore 64 owners took to the Amiga like a duck takes to water and the Amiga saw some excellent game and demo offerings.

Amiga emulation has always proved a bit “tricky” on the PC as the system comprised of several custom chips and it uses a fair bit of processing power to emulate it well on PC. The main emulator for running your old Amiga software is WinUAE (Windows Ultimate Amiga Emulator.) It’s a bit of a bitch nuisance to set up and get running smoothly though, but you should get it going in 10 minutes. You may need find to a copy of the Amiga BIOS and operating system, a Google search will help you with this.

The best Amiga games ? Well, in my opinion:

• Defender Of The Crown – One of the original games for Amiga and a superb title. Take over feudal England and restore the monarchy. You don’t even need an emulator for this one, you can play the Flash version online right here.
• Lemmings – Oh come on, you know this game surely ? Classic Amiga puzzle platform game.
• The Secret Of Monkey Island – Classic point ‘n’ click game, shows up on PC as well.
• Frontier Elite 2 – Remember Elite from yesterday’s article on the Commodore 64 ? Well this is more of the same, better graphics etc.
• Populous – Superb God game.

And for some reason there’s quite a few pinball games on Amiga. Not surprising I guess as the Amiga had the power to do the format justice, C64 pinball games had been pretty dire.

And what of the Atari ST ?  Personally I liked the ST.  Ok, it wasn’t an Amiga (rumours were around for ages that there would be an emulator for ST on Amiga so you could play all ST software on your Amiga, it never happened) but it was still a nice system.  The operating system was Digital Research’s GEM, not dissimilar to the Amiga Workbench but not as “pretty” or as advanced. The best emulator seems to be STeem Engine which you can get from the Little Green Desktop website. The Atari ST had much the same games as the Commodore Amiga as well as the superb Goldrunner, an excellent shoot ‘em up. You can see STeem Engine running Frontier Elite 2 here:

You’ll find other emulators for 16 bit systems such as the Acorn Archimedes here.

More emulation posts to come.

Steve

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