Amiga Emulator for iPhone Demoed In Action

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iAmiga on iPhone 4
iAmiga for iOS (image: touchArcade)

There are few vintage computing clans who rival Cult of Mac members in zeal and tenacity, but fans of the Commodore Amiga come close.  The successor to the widely popular Commodore 64, the Amiga was a 16 bit multitasking computer that found great success in the gaming and video production markets.

Now the Computer-That-Never-Dies is coming to the OS of the future: iAmiga for iOS has been demoed and is (hopefully) coming soon to the App Store.

touchArcade has just posted a lengthy preview of iAmiga, a upcoming iOS release from mobile-app developer Manomio. The company currently offers a Commodore 64 emulator that made news by initially getting rejected from the App Store for it’s BASIC programming capabilities. TouchArcade’s Henry Patterson spent some time with a pre-release beta:

After spending some serious time with the iAmiga system, I can tell you that, for an early build, it is truly impressive. While it’s true that a few of the games that I tried glitched at some point, the vast majority ran perfectly and buttery smoothly on my iPhone 4. I’m talking about totally accurate sound, flawless graphics, glass smooth animation — just as if the games were being played on the standard config Amiga 500 that iAmiga emulates.

A video demo was created showing many popular Amiga games running on the emulator:

The games shown in the video are (in order): Defender of the Crown, Battle Squadron, International Karate +, R-Type, R-Type II, Speedball, Stunt Car Racer, Shadow of the Beast, Virus, and Xenon 2: Megablast.  Patterson notes that this list does not represent the list of games that will be available through the App Store, some were from his own collection of Amiga disk images.

Manomio has optimized Amiga emulator code in ARM assembly language to maximize performance.  The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3rd generation iPod touch devices are currently supported, with iPad support planned for a future release.  No release date has been announced.

[via MacRumors]

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