UAE - The Un*x Amiga Emulator
THIS PAGE IS MOVING
Resistance is futile. You will be redirected. Thanks to Stefan Reinauer, there
is a new UAE page. This
one will go away soon. Please change your links.
Note: All the files you can download from here have
the suffix ".bin" to prevent your favourite Web browser from displaying them.
Just remove that suffix, and you'll be fine. If you are using DOS, you will
need the tar and gzip binaries
to decompress some of the files.
Last revision of this page: 960911 (UAE 0.6.4)
You can also obtain the most recent versions from one of the mirror pages
below. They are all updated very quickly, so choose the one that is fastest
for you.
What is UAE?
UAE is a mostly complete software emulation of the hardware of the Commodore Amiga.
A Commodore Amiga, for those who don't know, is a 16/32 bit system based on
the Motorola 68000 CPU and a few specially designed custom chips that provide
very good graphics and sound capabilities. But if you didn't know, you
probably don't want an emulator.
There are many variations of the Amiga hardware. UAE only emulates the
original models. You will get a MC68000 CPU and the Old Chipset, the
emulation will behave like the A500 or A2000.
Required soft- and hardware
You need a computer running a Unix variant (Linux, Solaris, HPUX, etc.) or a
Mac. An ANSI C compiler is required to compile it. For Linux and the Mac,
precompiled binaries exist.
As a general rule, the faster your computer is, the better.
For best results, the Linux version is recommended, because
- I am developing UAE under Linux, and
- because of that, features like sound or joystick support are not available on
other operating systems.
- Linux (basically, any Unixoid system) is the best OS around. Plus it's free. Why use something else?
Apart from all that, you need a Kickstart ROM file for most purposes. Software
to transfer that from your Amiga to your PC is included. Please note: The
Kickstart ROM is copyrighted by Commodore-Amiga and may not be distributed. You
may only use the ROM from your own Amiga. And, no, I won't send you one.
Get the transdisk and the
transrom binaries if you don't want to download the whole source for them.
Current state
UAE can do nearly everything a real A500 can do, plus a few things an A500
can't do.
The buggiest part right now is the sprite emulation, it's also incomplete:
Sprite collisions are unimplemented.
The serial and parallel ports are not implemented.
Apart from that, everything should be implemented, and hopefully it's bug-free.
I still suspect one or two bugs in the blitter and/or MC68000 emulation,
though.
Compatibility
Programs that work include:
Turrican I, Katakis (Denaris), Champions of Krynn, Holiday Lemmings 94,
Powerpacker and lots of demos. See the included file "COMPATIBILITY" for more
details.
Current version: 0.6
The last released version is v0.6.0.
I finally remembered to bring the Linux binaries I made of 0.6.0:
Get
The binary for X11
or
The binary for SVGAlib
These are Linux ELF binaries compiled with libc 5.3.12, svgalib-1.2.10 and
X3.1.1.
Versions beyond 0.6.0 are experimental, may contain numerous bugs, and may
even fail to compile.
The latest is v0.6.4. The filesystem code
is bug free (tm), so is the blitter. At least until I find the next bugs.
The SVGAlib version has a user interface like the DOS version now. There's
a m68k->i386 compiler, which is very experimental and needs lots of tuning.
Some other changes...
Ports
The DOS port is finished. If you have any questions concerning it, mail
Gustavo Goedert. Version 0.6.4 of
the DOS port is available from
Gustavo's Web page.
A DOS UAE mirror page in
Germany is also available if that's faster for you.
The Mac port (0.6.0) is also available.
It is maintained by
Ernesto Corvi, please ask him any Mac-specific questions.
The source code for the BeBox version, ported by
Christian Bauer is
included with version 0.6.0 and should compile cleanly.
Also included is the NextStep port from
Ian Stephenson.
Krister Bergman has ported UAE to the
XFree86/OS2 environment. You can get this port from
Krister's page.
Software
Thanks to the people who have set up other UAE pages, I no longer have to keep
lots of diskfiles with demos around. One of these is pretty useful, though:
Disk 1 of the RSI Megademo. Use this to test
whether UAE works on your machine if you don't have a Kickstart, or the
Kickstart doesn't seem to work. (Don't forget to decompress the diskfile).
If you want to help
There used to be a projects list here, but this is now included with the
source archive (the HTML version was out of date quite badly).
Occasionally, people ask me whether they should send me games that don't work.
Don't do it. I'll delete such mails unless the program is public domain (and
even then, mailing me the name of the program and a ftp site to obtain it from
is a much better idea).
Thanks to..
- Jay Miner, Dale Luck, R.J. Mical and the other people who developed the
Amiga.
- Felix Bardos: For not complaining about how long I haven't returned his HRM.
- Hetz Ben Hamo sent an email to Commodore asking for permission to give at
least an older version of the Kickstart away. Unfortunately, the response was
negative.
- the contributors: Alessandro Bissacco, Hannu Rummukainen, Andre Beck,
Ed Hanway, Ernesto Corvi, Denis Sablic, Marcus Sundberg, Marco Nelissen,
Gustavo Goedert, Thorsten Frueauf, Bruno Coste, Stefan Reinauer, Christian
Bauer, Ian Stephenson, Samuel Devulder, Dirk Vangestel, Samuel Mackrill,
Thierry Lescot, Oliver Moehre.
For a more detailed description of what
everyone did, look at the CREDITS file in the distribution.
- possibly more people that I've forgotten right now. Mail me if you feel
left out.
Miscellaneous
Brian Wheeler has developed a Perl utility that makes it possible
to access files contained in an .adf diskfile. It is available from
here.
Several people have made UAE Web pages that usually provide sourcecode for the
most recent versions, plus a mixture of binaries, screenshots and additional
information.
Gustavo Goedert has set up a WWW discussion board
for UAE.
Paul Liss has set up a page describing how he got UAE up and running. If you
have problems installing UAE, try if you can find some help
here.
Per Olofsson has made a number of
screenshots of UAE
running all sorts of programs.
I removed Hetz Ben Hamo's page temporarily from the list - he says he'll have
a better one ready soon.
Mika Peltomaa also has set up a
UAE page, still under construction.
Petter Schau has set up a page providing
disk images of several Amiga demos.
If you don't want to run an Amiga emulator, but want to have an
Amiga-like look for X Windows nonetheless, get the amiwm window manager.
A bit of history: the first versions of this program were called the
Unusable Amiga Emulator. Get v0.1 to find out why.
(Spoiler: It can't boot...)
BTW: this page is one of the most popular ones at this site. And it does not even
contain a single GIF. Except these two: Screenshot 1
and Screenshot 2. Now, it happens that people in
various newsgroups say "An Amiga emulation is impossible". DO NOT POST THESE
GIFS AS A "PROOF". Excuse the shouting, but this is really important. You will
be flamed badly if you post binaries, and for a good reason. These screenshots
aren't good as proof anyway. If you can't see why, download the NXAmiga GIF, which is an elaborate hoax.
One very nice screenshot was made by Jason Brittain: UAE running ShapeShifter.
Back to the main page...
"Machen wir mal 'ne Syntaxanalyse dieser metasprachlichen Struktur." -- Klaus Indermark
Bernd Schmidt
crux@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de