UAE is a computer

emulator In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use peri ...

which emulates the

hardware Hardware may refer to: Technology Computing and electronics * Electronic hardware, interconnected electronic components which perform analog or logic operations ** Digital electronics, electronics that operate on digital signals *** Computer hard ...

Commodore International Commodore International (other names include Commodore International Limited) was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Mac ...

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore International, Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and sign ...

range of computers. Released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

, UAE is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

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 Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

Amiga Emulator'' and later with other names as well. Since none of the popular expansions fit any more, the abbreviation no longer stands for anything, and the software is simply known as UAE — this occasionally gets

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

ed as Universal Amiga Emulator, Ultimate Amiga Emulator or Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator.

Features

UAE is almost a full-featured Amiga emulator. It emulates most of its functions: *

Original Chip Set The Original Chip Set (OCS) is a chipset used in the earliest Commodore Amiga computers and defined the Amiga's graphics and sound capabilities. It was succeeded by the slightly improved Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and greatly improved Advanced Gr ...

(OCS), Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and

Advanced Graphics Architecture Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) is the third-generation Amiga graphic chipset, first used in the Amiga 4000 in 1992. Before release AGA was codenamed Pandora by Commodore International. AGA was originally called AA for Advanced Arch ...

(AGA) * I/O devices: (

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...

drives,

joystick A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal cont ...

mouse A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...

and

serial ports In computing, a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in parallel. ...

) * Processor:

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sect ...

010 010 may refer to: * 10 (number) * 8 (number) in octal numeral notation * Motorola 68010, a microprocessor released by Motorola in 1982 * 010, the telephone area code of Beijing * 010, the Rotterdam Rotterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the ...

020 020 is the national dialling code for London in the United Kingdom. All subscriber numbers within the area code consist of eight digits and it has capacity for approaching 100 million telephone numbers. The code is used at 170 telephone exch ...

040 The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola nami ...

CPU, optionally a 68881 FPU, and as of WinUAE 3.0.0 beta 15, an enhanced

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM ...

JIT core using the

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of g ...

CPU libraries. * Memory: 2 MB Chip RAM and 8 MB Fast RAM, or 8 MB Chip RAM without Fast RAM. 64 MB

Zorro III Zorro (Spanish for 'fox') is a fictional character created in 1919 by American pulp writer Johnston McCulley, appearing in works set in the Pueblo of Los Angeles in Alta California. He is typically portrayed as a dashing masked vigilante who ...

Fast RAM, independent of Chip RAM setting (68020+ only). 1 MB Slow RAM, for compatibility. * Picasso 96 graphics with 8 MB of memory * Serial port, and Simple parallel port is only sufficient for printing. * Networking via bsdsocket.library emulation For software, UAE may use

disk image A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is usu ...

s made from original Amiga

s. These images have the file extension of " ADF" (Amiga Disk File). Actual Amiga disks cannot be used, because of limitations in the floppy controllers used in other computers. Images of Amiga formatted

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...

s 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 Amiga Forever is an Amiga preservation, emulator, emulation and support package published by Cloanto, which allows Amiga software to run on non-Amiga hardware legally and without complex configuration. The Windows version of Amiga Forever incl ...

. Original Kickstart 3.1 ROM images are also included with

AmigaOS4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore International, Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 develop ...

for

since version 4.1 Update 4. UAE also supports alternative system ROMs, such as those derived from the

AROS Aros may refer to: * Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium * Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland *AROS Research Operating System, a free software ...

project, however these do not provide the same degree of software compatibility as the original ROMs.

Portability

UAE has been ported to many host

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s, including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

, Microsoft Windows,

RISC OS RISC OS is a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was designed to run on the ARM chipset, which Acorn had designed concurrently for use in its new line of Archi ...

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provi ...

, Android, the

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by th ...

console, the PSP, PSVita and

GP2X The GP2X is a Linux-based handheld video game console and portable media player developed by South Korean company GamePark Holdings. It was released on November 10, 2005, in South Korea only. The GP2X is designed for homebrew developers as wel ...

handhelds,

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

, the

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major home game console, ...

and

Dreamcast The is a home video game console released by Sega on November 27, 1998, in Japan; September 9, 1999, in North America; and October 14, 1999, in Europe. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, preceding Sony's PlayStation 2, N ...

consoles, and even to

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale devel ...

and

Emulation speed

There have been many threads in the past on

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

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 __NOTOC__ Year 486 ( CDLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Basilius and Longinus (or, less frequently, year 12 ...

, while keeping various emulated chips (the Amiga chipset) 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 The Amiga 500, also known as the A500, is the first low-end version of the Amiga home computer. It contains the same Motorola 68000 as the Amiga 1000, as well as the same graphics and sound coprocessors, but is in a smaller case similar to that ...

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 __NOTOC__ This is a list of games for the Amiga line of personal computers organised alphabetically by name. See Lists of video games for related lists. This list has been split into multiple pages. It contains over 3000 games. Please use the Tab ...

and applications can run smoothly on a

Pentium II The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB ...

-era system. The realization that a useful Amiga emulator could be written contributed to an increase in enthusiasm about emulation, which started or sped-up efforts to write emulators for other and often less popular computer and electronic game architectures. A major improvement was made in 2000 by Bernd Meyer with the use of

Just-in-time compilation In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is a way of executing computer code that involves compiler, compilation during execution of a program (at run time (program lifecycle phase), run tim ...

, which significantly improved the emulation speed, to the extent that average PCs could now emulate some

Amiga software Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the l ...

faster than any real Amiga could run it. UAE can use as much of the host's power in

native mode In computing, native software or data-formats are those that were designed to run on a particular operating system. In a more technical sense, native code is code written specifically for a certain processor. In contrast, cross-platform software ...

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 A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...

" 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

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ...

s of the original program: * WinUAE, designed to run on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, ported by Mathias Ortmann and currently developed by Toni Wilen * PUAE, designed to run on Unix platforms (continuation of the abandoned E-UAE and also a port of WinUAE) * FS-UAE, designed to run on

and

(a port of WinUAE with a focus on emulating games, featuring a new on-screen GUI and cross-platform online play) * 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 (SAE), designed to run in a modern browser using

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

and

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HT ...

. 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 Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

. 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:

References

* Announcement by Bernd Schmidt on Usenet, Message-ID:
[email protected]
. * Announcement by Bernd Meyer of the Just In Time compiler on Usenet, Message-ID:
[email protected]
.

External links

UAE Website

WinUAE Website

PUAE - fork of E-UAE

FS-UAE - A fork of WinUAE and E-UAE

Scripted Amiga Emulator

Gamebase Amiga
- provides a single click ROM starting interface on top of WinUAE {{DEFAULTSORT:Uae (Emulator) Amiga emulators AmigaOS 4 software Amiga emulation software Proprietary video game console emulators GP2X emulation software MacOS emulation software MorphOS emulation software Linux emulation software Unix emulation software Windows emulation software 68k emulators 2005 software Cross-platform software