UAE (emulator)


UAE is a computer emulator which emulates the hardware of Commodore International's Amiga range of computers. Released under the GNU General Public License, UAE is free software.

History

Bernd Schmidt conceived of an emulator that can run Amiga software when he found that such a task was widely believed to be impossible. Schmidt had written previous programs for Amiga, and was further motivated by the desire to not lose games, demos, and sound modules to switching operating systems. UAE was released in 1995 and was originally called the Unusable Amiga Emulator, due to its inability to boot. In its early stages, it was known as Unix Amiga Emulator and later with other names as well. Today the name stands for Universal Amiga Emulator.

Features

UAE is almost a full-featured Amiga emulator. It emulates most of its functions:
For software, UAE may use disk images made from original Amiga floppy disks. These images have the file extension of "ADF". Actual Amiga disks cannot be used, because of limitations in the floppy controllers used in other computers.
Images of Amiga formatted hard drives can also be made. UAE also supports mapping host operating system's directories to Amiga hard drives, and finally, physical Amiga formatted hard drives can be mounted.
UAE does not include the original Amiga operating system ROM and files, which are required for running an Amiga system. These are included under license in packages like Amiga Forever. Original Kickstart 3.1 ROM images are also included with AmigaOS4 for PowerPC since version 4.1 Update 4. UAE also supports alternative system ROMs, such as those derived from the AROS project, however these do not provide the same degree of software compatibility as the original ROMs.

Portability

UAE has been ported to Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, MS-DOS, Windows, RISC OS, BeOS, NEXTSTEP, Palm OS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation Portable, Vita, GP2X, iOS, Wii Dreamcast, AmigaOS, MorphOS, and AROS.

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 all in sync and appearing as they were supposed to appear to software.
UAE was almost entirely unusable in its first releases, but slowly and step by step, it fleshed out its support of the Amiga chipset and by the end of 1997 was able to emulate an Amiga 500 at a quality and speed that were sufficient for productivity use and for many games.
Since then, UAE has been 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 running on. Many Amiga games and applications can run smoothly on a Pentium II-era system.
A major improvement was made in 2000 by Bernd Meyer with the addition of just-in-time compilation, which significantly improved the emulation speed, to the extent that average x86 PCs could emulate some Amiga software faster than any real Amiga could run it. UAE can use as much of the host's power in native mode as possible, or balance it with other requirements of the host OS, or to accurately reflect the original speed, depending on a user's choice. UAE also provides an RTG-compatible "video card" for the Amiga side of the emulation which is tailored for display on the host hardware, so as not to be limited to the emulation of the original Amiga video hardware.

Project development

There are six main forks of the original program:
  • WinUAE, designed to run on Windows, ported by Mathias Ortmann and currently developed by Toni Wilen
  • PUAE, designed to run on Unix platforms
  • FS-UAE, designed to run on Windows, macOS and Linux
  • UAE4all, a stripped and optimized version, designed to emulate an OCS Amiga on low-end devices. UAE4all2 add AGA and hard disk support.
  • Scripted Amiga Emulator , designed to run in a modern browser using JavaScript and HTML5. It is also based on WinUAE and was released on 1. September 2012 by Rupert Hausberger. SAE needs a very fast computer to run on.
  • UAE4ARM, designed to run on ARM devices including the Raspberry Pi. It's the only fork supporting Just-In-Time on ARM devices. Others supported platforms are Pandora, Android and libretro.
The most active fork is WinUAE; current versions of this still contain bugs and compatibility issues.
Specific versions: