Hi,

I have been wondering from reading the threads that the Amiga is a hobby thing, an interest, a thing of fun but what do you guys favour these days?

Is it the real thing, were you can sit down and relive the glory days and marvel at what magic an Amiga is or;

Do you go for the Emulator, there has been massive changes and they are so good that you'd think you are using the real thing.

I'm probably playing devils advocate on this but I'd be interested to see your views...

Over to you guys...
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I voted for both, as I like, if only sometimes, to play some games on my real C64 or Amiga, but usually I tend to use the emulator. Imagine at work, when you bring along your C64 and plug it next to your PC!
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I mostly use my A1200 but when i'm doing screenshots for the main site or i'm running one of the higher end games i'll use the emulator as it's just faster.
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I voted for both, as I like to setup with an emulator, and then transpose this to the original.

I love hacking the original one too, I doubt i would have any of my half dozen amigas completely finished any time soon, and thats the way i like it
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I voted for the real thing. Nothing beats it.

Emulators are handy though, especially since they are very good these days.
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Couples of months back I'd have gone for emulation but when my A1200 developed a fault with the display I simply had to replace it (got two mobos just in case ). It just didn't feel right even with the original HD hooked up to the PC.

But we're so lucky to have Toni churning out one version of WinUAE after another.

Emulation is definetly for those coming back after a LONG break. There's just too much hassle with real hardware and the OS if you haven't got the experience.
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Like others here, I find it difficult to just choose one of the categories, so I've voted for both.

Emulation is extremely handy when it comes to grabbing screenshots for the main site, so I often tend to use WinUAE for this task. It's fast and efficient and I don't have to copy the files from one machine to another. Also, the fastest Amiga I have is an Amiga 1200 with Blizzard MKIV 68030 accelerator card. This card mostly gets the job done, but with demos requiring more memory and better CPU, WinUAE is my only option.

On the other hand, nothing beats the experience of using a real Amiga. These days I'm enjoying my new Amiga 600 with a CF adapter and 1MB of extra memory. It's hard to describe, but whenever I use a real Amiga, computing is fun again. So whenever I use the 1200 or the 600 (or the CD32), it's always a blast.
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As with many of the others here I voted for both. I tend to mostly use emulation as I have the PCs already setup so it is easy to just fire up WinUAE for a few games. And also load up other emulators too.

But there is always that sense that something special is missing when using an emulated Amiga. It is hard to describe what it is, but I'm going to say it is missing the soul of a Real Amiga. There is just something special when you boot a real Amiga and use it.
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I think it's that Emulators are too clean. When something goes pear shaped with an emulator you just restart. If it goes on a rela Amiga then you have too look into what happened.
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No... I don't think it is that in my case. The actual feel/experience you get when using a real Amiga, playing games or using applications, is different to emulation.

I suppose it is a bit like racing cars in a computer game, compared to racing a real car. You can't actually feel the car or sense what it is doing in the simulation.
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