A major Con is that you cannot use or develop PPC based Amiga titles (you can however use it to rewrite 68k assembler code into better portable C code). The emulation is only limited to 68k code. For instance, Amigadog`s Movie player only runs on PPC powered Amigas, and therefore the DVD playback feature it supports can`t be used with these emulators. Also most classic AmigaOS game titles cannot be used directly when using these emulators. Some newer game titles supporting retargetable standards like Exodus, Freespace and the excellent free internet multiplayer Dynablaster-clone Dynamite do work, however. For more freely distributable and retargetable software I recommend browsing through GFXBASE reviews. Also people are working on solutions for these problems. You can, for instance, already run a port of the Universal Amiga Emulator within the emulated AmigaOS environment, but as with any UAE solution currently available this is far from optimal. A list of software already tested under AmigaXL and Amithlon can be found here.
Another problem which exists with all Amiga emulators is that almost no other systems than Amiga computers themselves are able to read 880 Kb/ 1760 Kb formatted Amiga diskettes. Mainstream diskdrive controllers can`t find the beginning of tracks on Amiga disks, as classic Amigas write entire tracks at a time without the use of sector gaps. Only Individual Computer`s Catweasel ISA based controller can currently add this feature to PCs. Another problem which arises is that newly inserted diskettes are automaticly detected by Amiga drives but not by common PC diskdrives. CD/DVD drives luckily do support this feature, and therefore after inserting CDs or DVDs, a CD icon will pop up on your Amiga desktop and it will work perfectly. The same does not happen while inserting diskettes. Therefore, with Amithlon you need to manually tell AmigaOS that it has to check for a new diskette with the command "DiskChange pc0:". For Amiga XL it is best to copy the contents of a disk onto your harddrive from the QNX RtP "side." You can see and move AmigaOS files stored on your harddisk from QNX RtP and vice versa.
One last Pro is that AmigaOS XL comes with a good AVI and Quicktime player called "Action", which is a cutdown version of "MooVId" that supports 3ivX, OpenDivx among other codecs. A MP3/WAV/AIFF player called "AMPlifier" is also included. For testing the multitasking and multimedia performance of AmigaOS XL, you could use the example multimedia files stored on the AmigaOS XL CD. There are trailers of both "Charlie's Angels" and "Monsters, Inc." included on the CD. Copy these files to your harddisk to see how well several movies can be played simultaniously. You can do fancier multimedia stuff while emulating AmigaOS on PC hardware as compared to actual natively written PC operating systems!
A clear picture of AmigaOS XL running on my Laptop
