Unix Amiga Emulator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Unix Amiga Emulator | |
 E-UAE 0.8.27 configuration and control panel. |
|
| Developer: | Bernd Schmidt (UAE) Toni Wilen (WinUAE) Richard Drummond (E-UAE) |
|---|---|
| Preview release: | 0.8.25 / ? |
| OS: | Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, BSD), DOS, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RiscOS, BeOS, NextStep |
| Use: | Emulator |
| License: | GPL |
| Website: | UAE home page |
UAE is a free emulator, designed to run software written for the Amiga range of computers. The first version was released in 1995.
The user of the emulator would typically load an application into the emulator and use it. The emulator program tries to produce a similar experience as the original Amiga computer did. The emulator will play the same sounds and display the same picture as the original computer did. Modern controllers (e.g. joysticks) differ from those on the original Amiga computer, but the emulator will let the user take advantage of keyboard or modern controllers to use the emulated software.
For software, UAE may use disk images made from Amiga floppy disks or hard drives. UAE also supports mapping host operating system directories to Amiga hard drives.
Contents |
[edit] Features
UAE is almost a full featured Amiga emulator. It emulates most of its functions:
- Original Amiga chipset, Enhanced Chip Set and Advanced Graphics Architecture
- I/O devices (floppy disk driver, joystick, mouse and serial ports)
- Processor (Motorola 68k)
[edit] The name
UAE was originally called the Unusable Amiga Emulator, due to it not even being able to boot, but that name has since become obsolete. The abbreviation is now commonly expanded as "Unix Amiga Emulator". Because the software now runs on other platforms besides Unix, other expansions exist, primarily "Universal Amiga Emulator", "Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator", "Ultimate Amiga Emulator", or even the recursive "UAE Amiga Emulator".
[edit] Portability
UAE has been ported to many host operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD, DOS, Windows, RISC OS, BeOS, the Xbox console, and even AmigaOS, where it allows software that requires the Amiga chipset to be run on modern PPC-based AmigaOS machines.
[edit] Emulation speed
There have been many threads in the past on Usenet and other public forums where people argued about the possibility of writing an Amiga emulator. Some considered UAE to be attempting the impossible; to be demanding that a system read, process and output 100 MB/s of data when the fastest PC was a 66 MHz 486, while keeping various emulated chips (the Amiga chipset) all in sync and appearing as they were supposed to appear to software.
For a long time, UAE was entirely unusable but slowly and step by step, it fleshed out the support of the Amiga chipset and by 1998 was able to more-or-less emulate an Amiga 500 at full speed.
Today, UAE is quite usable, thanks partly to the effort taken to develop it and partly to the big improvements in technology that brought computers many times faster than those UAE was initially run on. Many Amiga games and applications can run smoothly on a Pentium II-era system. The realization that a useful Amiga emulator could be written contributed to an enthusiasm about emulation, which started or speeded efforts to write emulators of the most various, obscure and complicated architectures.
A major improvement was made in 2000 by Bernd Meyer with the release of a Just In Time compiler, which significantly improved the emulation speed, to the extent that PCs could now emulate some Amiga software faster than any real Amiga. Like all good platform emulators, UAE uses as much of the host's power in native mode as possible. UAE provides a "video card" for the Amiga side of emulation which is tailored for display on the PC hardware, rather than have to go through the complex emulation of Amiga's video hardware.
[edit] Project development
There are currently two forks of the original program:
- WinUAE, designed to run on Windows
- E-UAE, an experimental tree which ports back some stuff from WinUAE
Today the most active fork is WinUAE, so active and well developed that the E-UAE is actually porting back to POSIX platforms from the Win32 based WinUAE. WinUAE is a stable platform and nears 100% compatibility for most software but, as has become a problem with other platform emulators (and projects such as Wine), for some old games WinUAE requires careful configuring or compatibility problems which were evident in the original Amigas can flare up, such as 68000 code causing exceptions on an emulated 68040, just like it would on perhaps an Amiga 4000/040.
[edit] See also
- Fellow, another Amiga emulator which was released not too long after the first usable versions of UAE, and generated competition beneficial to both projects.
[edit] References
- Announcement by Bernd Schmidt on Usenet, Message-ID: <421jqo$91h@news.rwth-aachen.de>.
- Announcement by Bernd Meyer of the Just In Time compiler on Usenet, Message-ID: <8nbkst$ta9$1@wombat.cs.monash.edu.au>.
[edit] External links
- UAE Website
- WinUAE Website
- E-UAE Website
- Amiga TOSEC-v0.29 - Large game package to the Download as 7z for Amiga emulators, ideally to transmit and copy on exactly one DVD with 4.38 GiB. (A Bittorrent client is needed for the Download)
- Amiga Forever Website
- Checklist - Emulator Compatibility lists
- List of websites where Amiga games ready for emulators can be downloaded legally and free of charge
