Development of "Denise" seems to date back to around 2017, when it started as a Commodore 64 emulator. In March 2023 author PiCiJi released version 2.0, which adds Amiga 500 and 1000 emulation. Running Fedora Linux, I gave it a quick try.
Apart from downloading and extracting the archive, no program installation was required. Just double-clicking "Denise" program icon, and selecting Kickstart ROM file and ADF in the preferences, I was able to nicely play a round of "Tinyus", with sound, and without any glitches or performance issues (i7-4790T, 2.7GHz).
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| Double-click icon, select Kickstart ROM, select ADF, and play. Nice! |
"Denise" has a little bit of history, which certainly helps when a new emulated platform is created. Preference and menus need a little more work (localization, graphics), but nothing's missing, and everything (still) looks very clearly structured with the added Amiga-related items. (Most?) changes to preferences take effect immediately.
When playing "Tinyus", I had to make a little change to the input configuration: "Tinyus" needs the Space-bar key, which is occupied by Joystick-Fire-Button per default. Assigning a new key just took a couple of seconds without reading instructions. Perfect.
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| "Denise" preferences: C64 and Amiga cores |
"Denise" feels as if it has been designed with a lot of modularity in mind. For example it looks as if the (emulated) video output section from the existing C64 emulation is being used for Amiga video, too - which totally makes sense, as both machines generate quite similar video signals. And there is a "core selection" setting - future new cores can probably be expected.
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| More "Denise" preferences |
Emulation performance was perfect with "Tinyus", which is also reflected by SysInfo's speed test results: "Denise" runs cycle-exact. (No further performance tests were done by me at the current point in time.)
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| SysInfo: That looks pretty cycle-accurate. |
To round it up, here's a shot of "Denise"'s C64 emulation running "Destroyer", and the C64 settings window.
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| "Denise" C64 emulation and preferences |
It's still a bit rough around the edges, and a bit limited, but, wow, "Denise" is a fantastic new Amiga 500 and 1000 emulator! And you get a great C64 emulator along the way! Try it, it's great!
You can download "Denise" from its sourceforge website
https://sourceforge.net/projects/deniseemu/
If you like to read some program code you can visit "Denise"'s git repo:
https://bitbucket.org/piciji/denise/src/master/
Additional sources:
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2023-04-00113-EN.html
