A few weeks ago I got curious about the increased interest in AmigaOS 4.x emulation, and decided to run a survey. The results are in. Many thanks to the 447 people who took the time to fill in the survey. Let's have a quick look at the results...

The Results in Brief

  • Roughly one quarter (25.5%) of respondents don't use AmigaOS 4.x regularly, or at all (yet they're interested enough to bother filling in the survey). There are some potential future AmigaOS 4 users in there...
  • The majority of respondents use real PowerPC hardware (54.8%)
    • Roughly two thirds have never tried AmigaOS 4 under emulation (62.1%), mostly because they're just not interested. Why use an emulator when you've got the real deal?
  • Nearly one fifth use emulation exclusively (19.7%)
  • Almost one tenth use both hardware and emulation (9.6%)
  • UAE (all variants) absolutely dominate among emulation users, with 69.8% using UAE
    • Some use both QEMU & UAE (16.8%)
    • The smallest group use QEMU along (10.9%). Not surprising given that QEMU only became usable for AmigaOS 4.x fairly recently compared to UAE
  • Most common reasons for using emulation:
    • AmigaOS 4 on a laptop (OS4 on-the-go)
    • Low cost of entry (no need to buy high-priced hardware)
    • Use as part of software development (e.g., testing), or some other task such as recording videos of AmigaOS 4 in action
  • Most common complaints:
    • Slow
    • Crash-prone
    • Slow/limited graphics drivers (limited resolutions, performance, & no 3D)
    • Hard to install
    • Other issues such as difficulty transferring files between the host OS and AmigaOS 4 in the emulator

All in all, there's much room for improvement in emulation support, and a potential for new users (and hopefully developers).

Full Results Summary

You can look at the full summary, glorious graphs and all, on this page (link).