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

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..



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.


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"Machen wir mal 'ne Syntaxanalyse dieser metasprachlichen Struktur." -- Klaus Indermark
Bernd Schmidt crux@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de