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ramiga

The status of this package is currently highly experimental. It provides R bindings to the vAmiga emulator.

It will:

  • Provide programmatic access to the emulator
  • Emulate Amiga’s with the original chip set.
    • So, neither enhanced chip set nor the Advanced Graphics Architecture are supported
  • Capture output
  • Provide input (mouse movements, keyboard events, etc.) programmatically

It will not:

  • Provide full interactive visuals and peripherals
    • There is simply no way to exchange this information between the R environment and the emulator with sufficient speed and efficiency.

Installation

You can install the development version of ramiga like so:

remotes::install_github("pepijn-devries/ramiga")

Example 

library(ramiga)
emu <- RamigaEmulator$new()

emu$power_on()
#> Amiga emulator (PAL) powered on:
#>   CPU: 68000
#>   Memory: chip 0.5Mb; slow 0.5Mb; fast 0.0Mb; ROM: Not loaded

Not on CRAN

This package will not be appearing on CRAN any time soon. If this package were to be submitted to CRAN there are several hurdles to be taken:

  • All code should comply with ISO standards.
    • With some effort this would be achievable
  • Package size should not exceed 5 MB, but should at best be below 10 MB
    • This will be difficult, if we want to keep all features
  • We should avoid using non-standard compilation flags (like -Wa,-mbig-obj)
    • This could be fixed by splitting up large objects into multiple smaller ones.
  • This package relies heavily on C++20 features. This will not fly on all CRAN build and check machines (which is a requirement).
    • This will take way too much effort to convert to CRAN acceptable alternatives.

I pay as much attention to quality as any of my other R packages, so you should be able to enjoy using this package. But for the reasons stated above, I will not submit to CRAN. You can install it from R-Universe as specified above.

Why not use libretro? I did explore this avenue. It doesn’t need C++20, so in that respect it would be easier to get on CRAN. However, the library is much bulkier than vAmiga. It also doesn’t have a sleek and easy to implement API like vAmiga. So I’ll leave this challenge for someone else to confront.