It's Amiga! It's News! It's Amiga News!14/03/98

Despite the Amiga being very dead indeed, it continues to stagger onwards in a crudely reanimated zombie sort of way. As such, things continue to happen in "The Amiga world" which may be of interest to you, our readers. One of these in particular.

Y'see, there's something interesting coming. For years, people have pointed out that an Amiga that you could plug into your PC would be a good idea. You'd be able to keep running all your old Amiga software, and you'd be able to run Amiga stuff as well. It would be cheaper than a "Proper" Amiga, because you wouldn't have to worry about an extra keyboard, hard drive, monitor and so on.

Since the advent of UAE, the need appeared to vanish. After all, most people only wanted Amiga compatibility for games. With UAE, you could play those games. Obviously, the problem had been solved.

Or had it?

Let's be blunt here. UAE is a miracle of software technology, doing things that people said were impossible. But it's hardly a replacement for a real Amiga, is it? It's slow. And that's not going to change. And, although this might well amaze you, people out there still want to use serious Amiga software at a reasonable speed.

Hence the Siamese v4.0. It's a PCI card that plugs into your PC (Or, indeed, any other PCI machine as long as drivers exist) and runs Amiga software. It does this in a simple way. It is, in fact, an Amiga.

On this card, you'll find an AGA chipset, various other sundry items of electronics, and either a 68040 or 68060 CPU. Anything that runs on a reasonably modern Amiga will run on it, and run on it faster than on a "real" Amiga. And it'll integrate into your PC system, with Amiga screens appearing in windows and the clipboard being shared. It'll be almost like being able to run Amiga software under Windows.

And that's not all. Because of the AGA chipset on board, all the Amiga's old strengths in video work are kept. There's an RGB out port on the back, so you'll be able to run Scala and produce all sorts of interesting presentations without having to buy stacks of extra hardware. Anything you could do on an Amiga, you can do on this.

So, is UAE dead? Nope. There's a few reasons. First of all, UAE is free. The Siamese 4 is going to cost around £400, depending on the CPU option. Secondly, you'll note that I said "Anything that runs on a reasonably modern Amiga will run on it". In fact, this means that most of your old games (The main reason people use UAE) won't run on it.

So, is it totally useless? No. It should be possible for UAE to run in tandem with the card, only being forced to emulate stuff that's changed from older machines. Since AGA has a built in OCS emulation mode, the main problem would be the processor.

At the moment, UAE runs reasonably fast assuming that you're not doing a lot of work with the custom chips. Say trying to play music while producing plasma effects. Remove the custom chip emulation bottleneck, and UAE would fly. You'd be able to run all your old games in just the same way that they ran on your old 500. Sounds good, doesn't it?

There's one more problem, though. Unless a certain number of pre- orders is made, the card won't be finished and won't go into production. If you pre-order it, you've got an option on how much to pay as a deposit. The more money you pay now, the more money you save on the full price. So, if you're interested, go and take a look at Hi- Q's website at www.hi-q.co.uk (Or something like that. I don't have a chance to check this at the moment.) Go on. Go. Shoo. Go. Matthew Garrett