An "official" iPhone Amiga emulator!

As most will know the iPhone has been thin on the ground as far as emulation goes due to the closed wall policy of Apple and its App Store.

You might also know that a C64 emulator was finally allowed to be released/published on the App store last year, after Apple changed their policies in how Apps could be coded, and after talks between the developer of the C64 App and Apple it was given the green light.

The same developer, Manomino, is now back with something even better... an "official" Amiga emulator called iAmiga. The Official part is because he is said to be making the emulator under license from Commodore, to make it all legal and above board, I'm assuming as a way to agree it to be allowed into the App Store. The question is, who is this Commodore he is paying to license it? :unsure: The current kickstart rom license owners? We haven't known the real answer to that question in a long time. Cloanto maybe?

Anyway, down the details of iAmiga. No news yet on an official release date for the emulator itself. However there has been mention of some Amiga developers joining up with iAmiga's developer in order to use the emulator to re-release some of their most famous Amiga games onto the iPhone, and eventually the iPad (once iAmiga gets an official iPad version to support the larger screen).

The biggest announcement so far for developers joining forces is Cinemaware, and the official announcement of Defender of the Crown being released in the App store, running using iAmiga. This is quite a cool development. In addition other Cinemaware titles confirmed are It came from the Desert, Winds and a few others. Also current discussions with others to secure iOS releases include Factor 5 (Turrican I, II and III), The Bitmap Bros (Xenon II), Magnetic Fields (Supercars), Cope-Com (Battle Squadron), and Archer MacLean (IK+). In additional there is rumour that they are in talks with an unnamed major mobile publisher (Gameloft?) that's very interested in putting Amiga classics in the hands of today's gamers.

Allowing developers to publish their ageing Amiga back catalogue into the App store could be very interesting to them, because as it is using an Amiga emulator it doesn't require the developers to recode and update the games. So it is a win, win situation for them. They get to make money from their old back catalogue, keep old Amiga fans happy being able to relive some of the classics from the Amiga, and also support on going development of the iAmiga emulator. Quite a cool idea if it works and more developers come on board, seeing that they too can make a bit of money from their old games.

Now regarding the emulator itself, iAmiga is based on UAE4All and has been tied in to the developer's own ARM assembly optimied, emulated 68000 CPU core. This gives it good emulated performance on the iPhone, compared to similar Amiga emulators on other platforms. It requires the ARM7x architecture, so will only run on the iPhone 3GS/3rd Gen and the iPhone 4. With iPad support coming very soon.

It also only emulated the A500, so no AGA games at the moment (although the developer has indicated AGA support will be added after the initial release). But in early play testing reports it does emulate an A500 very well, with smooth accurate graphics and framerates, as well as accurate sound. Something many other mobile Amiga emulators can struggle with.

As well as the original plan to take the emulator and wrap it around various licensed Amiga titles and release them as stand-alone games, this has now expanded thanks to recent loosening of certain App Store restrictions, so we are likely to also see an Amiga shell app released to allow stand-alone games to be played. No idea yet what this will mean or what will be supported. I don't know if after disk image files like ADF will be directly supported in the final release (it currently is in the dev build), or if this will mean a proprietary game format, allowing the purchase of additional games for use with the emulator though the App store. I'm guessing at the latter, but wouldn't it be great if ADF support was there?

Finally, here is some game footage of iAmiga running some games. Among the games are Defender of the Crown, Battle Squadron, IT+, R-Type, R-Type 2, Speedbakk, Stunt Car Racer, SHadown of the Beast, Virus and Xenon 2: Megablast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajt2SChA2Tw

I would say that it could be a lot more interesting for iPad, than the tiny iPhone. Also the iPad 2 is quite more powerful.

But one thing is for sure, I won't pay for old Amiga games anymore.

From the screenshots and videos of the beta shown so far it is possible to load ADFs, so you might not need to pay for games, just whatever it asked for the emulator itself.

However, Amiga emulators on Android are free, so personally I'm sticking with that platform for mobile emulation. ;)

And how would you load the ADF files to the iPad?

Here's something interesting....the iCADE. Would like to see what this can run!

@DC. You can get files onto an iPad via WiFi and via adapters for USB sticks and SD ram cards, but I don't have a huge amount of experience with the iPad and think you might need to Jailbreak it to allow much of this, and also to run many of the emulators.

The Ipad will remain a device which will not be jailbroken, at least not now, perhaps when I get a iPad 3 ;)

Wow great report Harrison:) whatever happens it will be good that there's an Amiga on the iphone and ipad and with looking at the vid, running smooth and the sound quality is great.

There is something going on. Just found this video: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv8...os-iphone-ipad
I've been waiting for this for a lifetime, does somebody has more information? Thanks!