Amiga Emulator

Following are some extracts from the WinUAE Emulator Documentation (my Amiga emulator of choice). On the Links page you'll find numerous links for downloading Amiga game (ADF) files. Click HERE to go to that page (but remember the ROMs disclaimer on the homepage of Emulation+!)

UAE 0.8.8 Win32/DirectX, Release 7

For general information about the core UAE platform, refer to: http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/

This readme does _not_ cover the features of UAE that are common to all versions. If you're not familiar with UAE yet, consulting the generic distribution before attempting to use this port might actually not be a bad idea.

The generic UAE documentation can be found in the docs directory of this archive. Take these docs with a grain of salt, though: Not every detail of the Linux documentation pertains to WinUAE, and vice versa.

The latest release of UAE for Win32 is available from: http://www.codepoet.com/UAE/

If you are using Windows 95 (shame on you!) and don't have DirectX installed yet, you need to grab and install a copy first. UAE works with older versions of DirectX, so chances are that you won't have any problems if you had installed a DirectX game on your machine at least once.

Windows NT 4.0 comes with DirectX included, but you do need proper display drivers. Unfortunately, many of the default drivers that come with NT do not completely support DirectX, so you might need to contact the manufacturer of your display adapter for an update.

File-System Specifics

UAE will try its best to bridge the gap between Microsoft and Tripos file system semantics, but there are some inherent limitations:

1. The Windows "read only" flag controls the w and d bits on the Amiga side
2. r and e are always set
3. h, s and p cannot be set
4. The a flag is preserved
5. File comments are not supported
6. Not all file names that are "forbidden" under the lame Windows fs are being handled correctly yet. The most common ones, however, are.

Beware: UAE does _not_ live in a chroot-like environment! There is no checking for accesses to directories above the mount point. Do not assume that your data is absolutely safe from rogue Amiga programs!

Keyboard Emulation

Most of your keyboard retains its regular functionality under UAE, but there are a few notable exceptions:

- if you don't have a Win95 keyboard, you'll have to use Ins/Home as a replacement for Left Amiga/Right Amiga (this is different from other versions of UAE). Also, if you are using WinNT with a Windows keyboard, you'll STILL have to use Insert/Home as your "Amiga" keys.
- HELP has been remapped to Page-Down
- F12 brings up the GUI
- Shift+F12 brings up the GUI-based debugger
- Scroll Lock toggles screen refresh, speeding up the emulation
- Pause toggles sound, speeding up the emulation (note that you can't enable sound this way if you haven't configured UAE to run with sound from the beginning).
- End+F1, F2, F3 or F4 allows you to change disks in one of the four Amiga disk drives. Shift+End+F1...F4 ejects the disk.

The keyboard replacements for an Amiga joystick are as follows:

a b c
Up Keypad 8 Cursor Up T
Down Keypad 2 Cursor Down B
Left Keypad 4 Cursor Left F
Right Keypad 6 Cursor Right H
Fire Keypad 0 Right Ctrl Left Alt

WinUAE supports gzip-compressed disk images. If you have a 32 bit (!) gzip.exe installed, you can store your disk images (.adz) and ROMs (.roz) in compressed format. Compressed disks will be write protected.

Windows NT users: Using the compression feature of NTFS instead of gzip is a good idea if you wish to save space and be able to write to the ADF files at the same time.

Performance Issues

On a sufficiently powerful PC, UAE will give you quite an authentic flashback into a (better?) past.

Thanks to DirectX, the raw drawing throughput of this version will be among the highest of all Intel ports. 800x600 is only about 20% slower than 320x200 on my Pentium 100, although it requires more than seven times as many bytes per second to be pumped across the PCI bus. UAE's native display depth is 16 bpp. This table shows how the net drawing speed is affected by your display type:

16 bpp full screen - 100%
16 bpp desktop - 98%
24 bpp desktop - 72%
32 bpp desktop - 60%

Unfortunately, windowed mode clipping causes system services such as mouse/keyboard input and the file system to slow down (there is no way of avoiding this at the moment). This does not affect SMP machines.

Sound is a luxury. Because sound output is strictly synchronized with video DMA, you _won't_ get clean sound _unless_ your machine is capable of running at 50 fps at least internally.

Rule of thumb: Get a PPro or Pentium II if you want full graphics and full sound at the same time (reportedly, the Pentium MMX 200 MHz, overclocked to 250 MHz [83.3 MHz bus speed], is a powerful platform for running UAE. I have no definite reports about the K6 and the M2 yet but these should do pretty good as well.).

On a Pentium 100 equipped with a Matrox Millennium, UAE-Win32/DirectX is slightly faster than the Linux version under AcceleratedX for programs that perform a _lot_ of screen updates, i.e. action games and demos. All other things should run at roughly the same speed.

Compatibility

The number of programs that don't run properly under UAE decreases with every new release. If you find a piece of software to require special treatment, please let me know. I have received copies of pirated software in my email in the past. Never ever do this to me.

Consult compatibility.txt for tips on how to get software running and a growing collection of user-submitted parameters.

In UAE 0.8.6, sprite problems are still an issue.

A few broken programs require instruction prefetch and/or exception 3 to be emulated (e.g. Shadow of the Beast I, Katakis and Denaris). These can be forced to run by playing with the "compatible-mode" CPU-flag in the CPU-settings section of the GUI.

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