gt1619a@prism.gatech.EDU (James is just this guy, you know...) (04/23/91)
There's been quite a bit of talk about NeXT emulation on an Amiga. Here's my two cents worth: Can it be done? Yes. How fast it be would be hard to say because of the great disparity in system speeds between the Amiga computers (you can get them up to 21MIPS, but try finding an A500 that goes that fast, you can't). Virtual memory and a display PostScript interpreter are also very feasible. There are various ways of either increasing the resolution (i.e., the new display modes or a2024 or a2410) which will still be less expensive than a NeXT. The NeXT kernal can be ported if someone is up to making the effort. Will it be done? I don't see it. It will take time and money. There aren't sufficient reasons for wanting to run NeXT software on an Amiga (there are only a handful of applications for the NeXT). Amiga emulation of the NeXT on an a3000 w/ '040 would probably be running at a speed that more approximates a stock a2000. However, the biggest thing in the way of such a product would be the necessary licensing of the NeXT kernal, display postscript, and all that. NeXT won't make it cheap. After all, Commodore may compete with NeXT as the weedle their way into the higher end market with the a3000, a3000T, and '040 based a3000s and a3000UXs which outperform RISC machines. However, NeXT is not really competing with Commodore as a majority of Commodore's user base is home users, and artists and video professionals. Should it be done? Well, I've used a NeXT here at the school for the occasional project, I wasn't impressed. The graphics were nice, but it was slow (too slow for what I was doing). I'd rather just use a well-equipped DecStation. However, I have no use for NeXTR emulation and I doubt that any other Amiga users would either, certain not enough to be worth the effort or expense. NeXT really doesn't have anything to offer, at least for what I'm looking for. I write my genetic sequence modelling and analysis software on my a3000 and am quite impressed with the performance and ease of writing C code for such things (at bargain basement prices yet) I hope to get an '040 card to speed the process up beyond that capable of any of the workstations available for public consumption. For anyone thinking of writing such an emulator should think twice. It won't be worth the effort.