A few weeks ago a friend/client wanted a usable, but cheap 2nd-hand 2nd laptop, and being computer illiterate asked me to translate "the numbers and letters" (specs) for her and help her choose.
Now personally Id not looked at 2nd hand pc laptop prices in a while, and I must admit I was pretty surprised, even on the back of me expecting them to be cheap.
She ended up with a core2duo@2.53ghz, 4gig ddr3, 500 data hdd, nvidia quadra nvs 180 gfx, etc. with a 3 month warranty for the piddly sum of $90aud.

Now clearly this far from cutting edge, but personally I like the idea of getting one (or something similar) now to replace my rpi2 that I use for media centre and light gaming in the lounge. At those prices theyre price competitive with the rpi's (taking storage/casing/power into account), and add quite a few options as far as emulation goes (along with video) due to raw power.
Granted theyre not as small as a rpi, but close the lid, put it out of the way and use wireless mouse/keyboard/controller and its still quite unobtrusive. Most laptops have vga and hdmi out, so connecting to the tv is no problem.

That's my plan at least

@fishy_fis

Hi, I have been running AmiKit or the like (AmigaForever) on an older Pc and a Mac laptop for some years, it been "practically" my only running Amiga. They have been fine for the occasional Amiga application and or game but with all the other stuff running and used on then they never had the feel of a solid "Amiga" if you take my meaning.

So... My plan - among others - now that Jan has released the Linux version of AmiKitX - is to convert my old Toshiba laptop [early duocore] (All ready running LinuxMint) to my own Amiga front ended Laptop.. we will see how it goes...

Although as a newly returned person the Amiga world I am going to see what I can get my old RPi 1B to do!

@intangybles

If your laptop's hardware is supported I recommend checking out Amithlon. Lightning quick and needs no host OS.

@fishy_fis

Will do, thank you!

@fishy_fis

Sorry, did not twig that was AmigaOS XL... Had looked into that but the emulation portion is getting bit long in the tooth (not to mention sourcing a copy of a dead product), I am hoping to achieve a similar result launching winuae under wine at boot.

Well that's the plan as I often say - don't always get there!

@intangybles

OSXL and Amithlon are 2 separate emulators in the one package. Amithlon has no custom chipset emulation, ergo runs system friendly software only. It also means the emulation being old doesnt really matter as you're pretty much just using cpu emulation. Apart from that you use amithlon or amiga os drivers, amiga libraries, and so on for support.

OSXL on the other hand probably isnt worth it as its essentially a modified uae intergrated onto qnx6.3. Glad I checked it out though as I ended up quite liking QNX.

@fishy_fis

Hello again and thanks for the info, in my hunting for my old RPi I also discovered I do still have a copy of OSXL and decided to do bit of reading, I see many updates to the kernel have been made in recent times.

So on the balance of it, would you feel its worth my while playing with it on the old Toshiba or would my time be better spent on manually putting together a wine/winuae solution? No to sure which way to go?

Quote:

OSXL on the other hand probably isnt worth it as its essentially a modified uae intergrated onto qnx6.3. Glad I checked it out though as I ended up quite liking QNX.

@intangybles

Ultimately I guess it comes down to what you want to do with it. If applications and more recent games, emulation, video and so on are more important Id definately go with Amithlon, but if scene demos, custom chipset hitting games, etc. are your priority I'd go the UAE route. There is a 68k AmigaOS build of euae, but its both quite old and lack jit cpu emulation, so it no speed demon. Fast enough on Amithlon to play most stuff full speed, but some of the custom chipset hitting games requiring a lot of grunt will be slow. Thankfully most of those can run on an RTG screen anyway.

It's the best "power 68k" system available in my opinion, but it is a bit of a learning experience at 1st, and it can be picky with hardware.

@fishy_fis

Thanks again for your input and suggestions! Memory is a funny thing..

Hunting in the cupboard I also found a machine (I had forgotten about in truth) a ThinkPad R51 that I setup to boot into Amithlon running on VirtualBox.. It used to work pretty well but as you say some compatibility issues with non-system-friendly software. I seem to remember I never could get it to run directly on the hardware so I played with VirtualBox... I must have a play if time permits!

Still I have decided I am going to have a go at an AmiKit X (Linux) based system and see how that plays out!

Thanks again.