Emulation on the Amiga

Clever programming (a library named Janus, after the two-faced Roman god of doorways) made it possible to run PC software in an Amiga window without use of emulation.

At the introduction of the Sidecar the crowd was stunned to see the MS-DOS version of Microsoft Flight Simulator running at full speed in an Amiga window on the Workbench.

Eventually, full-software emulators, such as PC-Task and PCx allowed Amigas to run MS-DOS programs, including Microsoft Windows, without additional hardware, at the costs of speed and compatibility.

[1] When Commodore introduced the Amiga 1000 in July 1985 it also unexpectedly announced a software-based IBM PC emulator for it.

[3] The application, called Transformer, was indeed extremely slow; The 'Landmark' benchmark rated it as a 300 kHz 286, far slower than the 4.7 MHz of IBM's oldest and slowest PC.

PCTask could also transfer files between Amiga side and the emulated MS-DOS machine; it could make use of GoldenGate bridge cards which allow the Amiga equipped with expansion slots to get complete control of its silent ISA slots and use PC-ISA cards.

PcTask has an 8088/80286/80486 JITM (Just in Time Machine) capable to map all instructions of these processors, but require 4 megabytes extra of RAM for activating this feature.

A-Max II was contained on a Zorro-compatible card and allowed the user, again using actual Mac ROMs, to emulate a color Macintosh.

Example virtualization software include ShapeShifter (not to be confused with the third party preference pane ShapeShifter), later superseded by Basilisk II (both by the same programmer who conceived SheepShaver, Christian Bauer), Fusion and iFusion (the latter ran classic Mac OS by using a PowerPC "coprocessor" accelerator card).

Virtual machines provide equal or faster speed than a Macintosh with the same processor, especially with respect to the m68k series due to real Macs running in MMU trap mode, hampering performance.

Although the magazine used copies of the genuine 64 ROMs, it found that some software such as SpeedScript did not run, and both emulators' performance was inferior to the real computer.

At the time it was released, people on the internet speculated it was part of the Emplant emulation solution, but in fact Apple 2000 was an independent project.