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UAE - The Amiga Emulator

© John Chandler

Apologies to those waiting for my next article. It's been a hectic few weeks, and a car accident recently really didn't help matters!

UAE is a topic I've been meaning to cover here for some time, but for one reason or another has been pushed aside. After delays such as obtaining a PC to run it on, I finally managed to install UAE on not one but two Linux equipped PCs. The first was a 380 MHz K6-2 running Debian 2.1 (UAE 0.7.x is included with the distribution CDs), and the second was a 450 MHz K6-2 running Mandrake 6.0 - the latter seems to come with a modified 0.8 (experimental) release that doesn't appear to have command line options!

As most will already know, Linux (or a UNIX flavour in general) is not a requirement for UAE as free (GPL) software versions are available for platforms as diverse as Windows PCs, DOS, BeOS, RiscOS, OS/2, MacOS... and even 68K and PowerPC Amigas. Windows users have the luxury of a commercial offering from Amiga developers Cloanto entitled "Amiga Forever" which is packed with emulator, various UAE-ready Amiga software, historical information and cross-platform utilities. For those without access to a real Amiga, and therefore licensed copies of the OS and ROMs, the Amiga Forever CD-ROM includes official ROM and disk images of all OS releases from 1.1 to 3.1 suitable for use by all ports of UAE. Amiga emulation is not an excuse for pirating software.

The first step with getting UAE up and running (after installing the software, that is) is to transfer the ROMs, and any software required, to the PC (I use the term PC here to describe any machine running UAE). UAE comes bundled with transrom and transdisk utilities that work on the Amiga to copy ROMs and disks respectively to an appropriate image file. Both are simple to use, though you'll need to run them from a Shell, and can output to almost any device - from disks to serial ports, offering various ways to get the images to the PC. I personally transferred files using a FAT32 formatted Zip disk.

Software CD-ROMs can also be mounted on the PC and used directly from the emulation, and I believe it should be possible to mount an Amiga FFS hard disk provided your PC supports the appropriate filesystem (my quick attempt to set Linux up with an FFS filesystem was less than successful, however).

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