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Amiga A500 Emulator for Chrome browsers

June 7, 2017 - Uncategorized
Amiga A500 Emulator for Chrome browsers

Amiga A500 emulator Portable native client

To show off the power of the native client software for the Chrome browser Google developer Christian Stefansen has ported over the free UAE Amiga Emulator to run under native client.
This allows users of the Chrome web browser to run an Amiga A500 in their browser window with no additional software requirements.

The emulator uses official Kickstart ROMs supplied by Cloanto and a copy of Workbench 1.3 . This allows you to boot up the emulated Amiga and have a play around with it some demos supplied. if you want to run your own Amiga games ADF files on the emulator you will need to buy the Amiga Forever Chrome plugin. There is no way of providing your own ROM files.

The developer of the emulator took about a month to port and tweak the UAE source code from the C programming langauge to native client. Although the emulator is cross platform working on Windows, MacOS and Linux versions of the Chrome browser it does not yet support Android or iOS.

This is an impressive technical feat and something that only a few years ago would have been impossible to do. It may not support the full features of some Amiga Emulators but could certainly give a nice boost of retro Amiga without the need to install an emulator.

It is a pity that is does support iOS versions of Chrome though as Amiga Emulation is all but impossible on an iPad or iPhone without jail breaking or having a developer license since Apple don’t allow emulators that allow you to load ROMs in the App store. There is of course the Scripted Amiga Emulator which runs an in any web browser that is capable of HTML5 and Javascript but when I tested this it was just too slow to be of any use on a tablet.  But perhaps with all the big browser players (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple) now backing webAssembly as the replacement for Javascript which should see a major improvement in the speed of browser based apps we may yet see an Amiga emulator that is truly cross platform and can run at full speed in the browser.

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