Interview with Peter Schau
                             Author of the Amiga500 emulator
                                        FELLOW
                                      by BeepBop


10/07/97 19:39



BeepBop : -Fellow emulate Amiga, why Amiga?


Peter : -I really liked the Amiga, especially the demos and programmed some
         myself back in the late 80's.  Being able to run those old demos
         is reason enough to emulate the Amiga. 



-Was it hard to write it?


-The hardest thing is to get the custom-chip emulation correct.
 Although the Amiga has good low-level documentation,
 it also has many quirks that can only be uncovered by experiments 
 on a real Amiga, or by studying programs that depend on them.

 But this is a general emulation problem that applies to all
 platforms. 



-What is the main advantage to use Fellow?


-It is fast.  



-Will there be any port to other system?



-I have no plans, but I'd like to see it ported to a proper OS like Linux.
 The general portability of the emulator is poor due to huge amounts
 of intel-assembly code, so a wide range of ports is probably not likely.



-What do you plan for the future?


-What is missing is a more cycle-exact graphics-emulation.This is
 needed to emulate a number of popular demo-effects.  

 Other than that, I hope more Amiga emulators emerge.  What we see today
 is first generation Amiga emulators. Until now UAE is by far the most
 extensive emulation. In a number of years I hope people can utilize
 next-generation processor power to do cycle-exact emulation of all the 
 components in the Amiga 500, to give near 100% compatibility.This has 
 happened to the C64 with CCS64.



-Which system do you want to emulate after the Amiga?


-None.



   For now Fellow is now at version 2.0 and you can download the source of version 0.2.
The homepage is: 
       
               http://www.ifi.uio.no/~pettersc/fellow/fellow.html

and is email is:pettersc@ifi.uio.no


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

beepbop@geocities.com