@~Our second 'techy' bit is: WinUAE - An Amiga emulator for Windows Written by Keeks Before I going on babbling about WinUAE I will just give you a brief (?) overview of emulators and of UAE itself. An emulator is a program which enables you to run software for a machine which has non-native hardware and a non-native operating system, on your computer. UAE is a software emulation, meaning that no extra or special hardware is needed to do this. The hardware of an Amiga is emulated accurately, so that Amiga software is tricked into thinking it is running on the real thing, with your computer's display, keyboard, hard disk and mouse taking the parts of their emulated counterparts. UAE stands for Unix Amiga Emulator and was original written by Bernd Schmidt for the Linux operating system around 1995. UAE is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This means that it is free software: you are welcome to distribute copies of it and/or modify it, under certain conditions (ie. not to make a profit from doing so). It also means that there is no warranty for UAE. Because its was released under the GNU Licence the source is freely available to anyone. This was done to allow other people to contribute to the development of UAE. It has also led to it been ported to the other platforms such as the Mac, DOS, the BeBox, NextStep, the XFree86/OS2 environment, pOs, Acorn RISC PC, Win32 and the Amigas (it is even able to run itself. Strange). What is special about UAE is that it is a co- ordinated project. All ports of UAE are the same. When something new is added to one it will be added to the others soon after, so that they are all compatible with each other. There is no preference between platforms. So what does UAE have to offer. Currently UAE is up to version 0.8.6 and includes the follow features. - A 68000, 68010 or 68020 CPU, optionally a 68881 FPU. - OCS Graphics Chipset, plus big bits from the ECS Chipset. Up until recently there was no hope AGA support as all the developers thought it would be too difficult to implement. But it was developed and it is being implemented as I write this. - Up to 2MB Chip RAM and up to 8MB Fast RAM, or 8MB Chip RAM without Fast RAM. - Up to 64MB Zorro III Fast RAM, independent of Chip RAM setting (68020 only). - Up to 1MB Slow RAM, for extended compatibility with problem software. - Up to 8MB of graphics card memory, usable by software that supports Picasso 96 compatible graphics cards. - 4 x 3.5" floppy disk drives (DF0:, DF1:, DF2: and DF3:). It's not possible to read Amiga disks, so these are emulated with disk files. This is because the PC floppy controller can't read Amiga disks. There is a way around this but requires some hardware knowledge. Instead floppy access is emulated differently: Floppies are emulated by means of disk files that contain a raw image of the floppy disk you want to emulate. A disk file is an image of the raw data on an Amiga floppy disk, it contains 901120 bytes (880K), which is the standard capacity of an Amiga disk. - A hard-disk: either a hard disk image file (A cache) or part of the native file system. - CD-ROM access. - Joystick support (with option of mapping joystick to numeric keypad). - Mouse support. - Ability to run in various screen modes (for better display quality or better speed). - Full stereo sound support, consisting of 4 x 8bit channels. - Beta parallel and serial port support. To actually run UAE, you'll need to install a ROM image from your Amiga as it is not and never will be distributed with the emulator because it is copyrighted software. Don't ask any of the authors to send it to you because they won't. If you're lucky you may find them on the net. There is a CD available with ROMs and various programs/tools available from Clanto (address available elsewhere in the text). They have been given permission to distribute the ROMs from Amiga Inc. You can't run UAE if you don't have this image. If you have an Amiga you can easily transfer it to the PC with a small program called transrom. You will need a program on the Amiga such as Crossdos of MessyDos to transfer it. These can easily be Downloaded from the Aminet. There is also a program for transferring disk images (ADF files) called transdisk. If you can't get CrossDos For MessyDos you can always use a parallel connection between the two computers as I have. Several companies offer various packages for this. One note that should be made is that the transferring software can only read the standard AmigaDOS disk format. This means that most games that rely on some form of copy-protection cannot be transferred. Now let's get on to WinUAE, the Windows version. As far as I know it was started by Mathius Ortmann and is now been developed by Brian King. It is a true windows application and requires that you have DirectX installed. Every option is easily accessed with the mouse. You are able to flow through the menus and able to configure every aspect of the emulator to suit your own performance needs for the sottware you want to run. You may notice that I haven't said anything about the recommend specs. for the emulator to run on. This will depend on the software you want to run. It will run on any Pentium PC. If you are only going to run small applications on WinUAE such as word processors etc a low spec Pentium will do. For games and demos you're talking 200mhz-300mhz PC for a windowed display. And an even faster PC for full screen displays. This is because the emulator was written for portability and not performance. There is another emulator based on the UAE source called Fellow. This has been optimised to run on the PC with greater performance over UAE but is not as compatible. I'll check this out soon. So to conclude, WinUAE is a great piece of software. I would recommend it to anyone who wants their old Amiga back. The only quibble I have with it is to take full advantage of it you will need a high spec machine. WinUAE is available from http://www.codepoet.com/UAE UAE's homepage is at http://www.freiburg.linux.de/uae You will find various other links at these pages including one to the UAE message board where you can go if you have any problems. - o -