Sure! Many over the years. Well, many versions. UAE, and there was a competitor named Fellow, which always had better performance, but worse compatibility. That was back when CPU clocks where in the low 100s of MHz when that mattered, nowadays UAE runs practically everywhere. Super Nintendo emulators are also what I like to use. They are fine! I now even have a tiny mobile emulation device that runs all the emulators, the Miyoo Mini. These pictures don't convey how tiny the thing is. Of course, that means I now have to use glasses to play it
And the rear buttons are hard to use. The plus version is a bit bigger.There are however a couple of very hard to overcome obstacles for emulation: Latency, correct refresh rate and clarity of motion.
Refresh rate:
I grew up on PAL devices which have a 50 Hz refresh rate, most devices nowadays run on 60. Of course, doubling to 100 Hz is an option, but at 60, you can choose between running your games 20% too fast or accepting choppy animations and uneven latency when the simulated framerate and the output framerate don't match. Or you go for tearing.
Latency:
The Amiga mouse communicates its position to the computer over four signal lines where the pair for each direction go off-off, off-on, on-on and on-off cyclically as you move it; they're simply the direct signals from photosensors that pick up the movement of the little wheels in the mouse. That IMMEDIATELY updates register values the CPU can read out to get the current mouse position, which can be translated to the position of the mouse cursor, a hardware sprite, in theory also immediately right before the scanline is at the position to display it. You can get the latency down to way below one millisecond if you set your mind to it.
Likewise, joystick input is available to programs immediately. If you poll the joystick, you get where it is NOW.
These machines had direct immediate control over what they do with the electron beam as it painted the image onto the CRT.
Same with sound. Order the sound hardware to start playing a sample, and it will do so right now.
On modern machines, the input devices have a polling rate and latency in themselves. The emulation has to complete rendering an entire frame before it can send it off to the screen. The screens themselves often have some latency. Sound needs to be buffered ahead a bit.
You can compensate for all of that, somewhat, by letting your emulator simulate ahead; so you poll input, simulate two frames, render the output, then go back one frame and repeat. This leads to little inconsistencies whenever the input changes, but at low compensation, you typically don't notice it. Not in the image, at least. For sound, this method does not work. Sound will always lag or pop.
Clarity of Motion:
CRTs flash the image, top to bottom, only for a short few milliseconds and are dark in between. That's why they flicker and one reason why we replaced them
But that also means that if an object moves across the screen and you follow it with your eyes, it will stay sharp; on a flat screen with continuous backlight, it will always blur. See https://www.testufo.com/ .Gaming monitors nowadays allow you to strobe the backlight (or, in the case of OLEDs, simply strobe the lights) to get you better clarity of motion. However, they usually only allow that for higher refresh rates to avoid flickering. You can solve the problem by throwing more power at it: Get a monitor that supports strobing and some integer multiple of your retro device's refresh rate, then you combine the strobing with black frame insertion by the emulator. That can also get latency down consistently. The emulator needs to support it, though, and it does not seem like UAE does.
Let me stress: All of that is not a big deal. These are problems modern games on modern hardware all face; worse, they usually have rendering pipelines that add another one or two frames of latency. We have gotten used to it. It's just that in these very few aspects, old games on old machines used to be better, technically, and it is lost in emulation.
The MiSTer simply has the old hardware rebuilt in circuits. It can have the exact same performance characteristics. Of course, if you use an USB controller with it, you get latency from that. If you attach it via HDMI to a flat screen, you get latency and motion blur from that. But you can attach original input devices and output to real CRTs, and if I read the docs correctly, with sub-frame latency.
Sweet! Of course, nothing beats the real hardware. I have my Amiga 500 right here, it's mostly working. The expansion memory broke a while back, that is all, but no game needs it.My brother and I have an Amiga 500 still from our childhood.... We will have to see if it's still working. I hope the capacitors, etc are OK. Many good times on this machine.
Don't worry too much about the caps, the A500 ones are apparently durable, the A1200 ones are the problem children. Oh, and the disks will start to fail to read around now, they were not built for eternity.
