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Internet Archive Posted 10,000 Browser-Playable Amiga Titles (techcrunch.com)
The folks behind the Internet Archive have added a huge trove of Amiga games and programs to the site, bringing the total to more than 10,000. All these games can be played on your web browser. The non-profit library first began adding Amiga software to its catalog in 2013. TechCrunch adds: We can't vouch for the quality of all of the Amiga titles that were recently posted up on Archive.org, but there sure as heck are a lot of them -- 10,000+, by the site's count, including favorites as Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, King's Quest and Double Dragon, along with what looks to be a fair amount of redundancy. I'm not really sure what the difference is between Deluxe Pac Man v1.1 and Deluxe Pac Man v1.7a, but I suspect it's fairly minor, even for completists.
It can't be that much different from emulating the games in some other language or platform. You'd have to emulate the CPU and chipset, collect input from the user (keyboard and mouse at least, and holy shit joysticks too!), and output the graphics (HTML5 Canvas) and sound (HTML5 audio) to the browser. Given that the MC68000 family of processors and the Amiga chipset have been emulated many times before already, plenty of inspiration exists to get you started.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
In fact this is the very emulator they are using.
SAE (possibly based off of UAE?)
But web browsers desperately need a better way to run code than turning it into JS - something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS. Chrome did something called PNaCl along those lines but it would have to be adopted across all browsers.
For a few weeks after Archive.org put up their emulations for coin-op arcade ROMs, you could find the whole Donkey Kong series, the Pac-Man series, Defender/Stargate, Pole Position, and a bunch of other top-tier arcade games in there. Shortly thereafter, the lawyers found out about it and cleared out nearly all of the top-tier games and a good swath of the second-tier ones as well. There are still a few gems that survived (Joust, Gorf, Berzerk), but the collection now is a fraction of what it started as.
something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS
First, there is asm.js, which is a subset of js that runs in almost every browser, which can be easily compiled into assembly. It has been the alternate proposal to PNaCl by mozilla, and has won against the google idea. Its basically the same as PNaCl performance wise, the sole difference is that PNaCl is bytecode while asm.js is in textual representation (and a valid subset of js, so it works even in browsers without direct support for asm.js).
Of course, the textual representation takes up more space than the bytecode, and even though gzip transport compression (which is usually deployed for http connections) gives a similar end product as pnacl, it takes a little overhead computation wise to decompress and in the end its a redundant step. Therefore, the browser vendors (including microsoft, which in fact really liked asm.js, it used it in its office 356 products) are now working on a native binary successor to PNaCl and asm.js which will get a proper standard. Its called web assembly.
I played with and also searched for various titles. Mostly it is endless demo scene disks, demo versions of games and many of them don't work properly. The ones that do load play sound erratically, the emulator timing ramps up and down like a record with variable speed playback.
There were some really amazing games on the Amiga, and you're not going to get the sense of what it was like here. No Psygnosis games, and I couldn't get even the Turrican Demo to work properly. Plus no options that I can see for scanline emulation, the line doubling looks pretty bad and doesn't present what it actually looked like on a CRT monitor.
The fascinating thing which is hard to realize now is that when games like "Shadow of the Beast" came out in 1986, the PC / DOS crowd was still largely on 16 color CGA with no sound beyond beeps and clicks unless you bought an expensive add on sound card like a Turtle beach. The Macintosh was just discovering color. We were enjoying arcade quality graphics and sound as far back as the Amiga 1,000 thanks to a set of discreet graphics and sound chips. (Paula, Agnes, Denise etc.) It was heady times and a great time to be an Amiga user, from the mid-80s till the early 90s.
Damn.
"After a beta-testing period, the emulated Amiga programs at the Archive have been taken down for further development. Thanks to everyone for testing the Amiga In-Browser emulation package during the beta period, and especially a thank you to the Scripted Amiga Emulator project, as well as db48x and bai, for all the hard work with this experiment."