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).
