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UAE - The Amiga Emulator - Page 2

© John Chandler

Only Amiga formatted floppies won't work, due to the limitations of PC floppy controllers - hence the disk image situation.

Emulation takes a hefty toll on the host processor, so you'll need a good Pentium or PowerPC class machine at least. Opinions seem to vary on the speed of emulation - on the test machines I used, the emulation varied from around the speed of my 25 MHz 68030 to maybe 040 speeds depending on the task at hand. Responsiveness is very good, though some poorly written games tend to have a few mishaps - but if you own an expanded Amiga you've probably seen all these problems and more.

In fact, the emulation is pretty much faultless and it really is only a few older games that have trouble - I suspect part of the blame lay with me using 68020 emulation and OS 3.0 ROMs, though. Applications software and other OS legal stuff works fine, and you can add Picasso96 support to make up for the lack of AGA (though I believe AGA is slowly filtering into the latest versions). I did find the mouse pointer a little frustrating to use for various reasons, at least under X11, and typing aappeeaarrss ttoo ggoo lliikkkeee tthhiiss if you aren't quick with your key presses. These are minor problems at best, however, and avoidable with a little bit of thought.

So, is UAE a 'convincing' emulation of the Amiga? On the whole yes. The versions I used didn't support the ability to have UAE occupying the whole screen, which would've really brought it alive for me, but UAE felt fine in everyday use. In fact, I knew it probably would be when I first copied the ROMs to the machine at work, loaded UAE and up popped something I haven't seen on my A4000 before: the animation asking for a boot disk. That brought up a big grin, I can tell you! (Little things please little minds, some would say).

UAE seems to spark a lot of debate in some Amiga circles. Is it an Amiga? Feels like one to me. Is it killing the Amiga? No. If anything it's another thing keeping the Amiga spirit alive. People who have long since departed the Amiga scene are using it, reminding themselves of the Amiga's talents and maybe enticing them to keep an eye on the new Amigas. People who love the Amiga but don't have access to the

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