Welcome to the UAE Amiga Emulator

UAE is a mostly complete software emulation of the hardware of the Commodore Amiga 500/1000/2000.
A Commodore Amiga, for those who don’t know, is a 16/32 bit computer system based on the Motorola 680×0 CPU and a few specially designed custom chips that provide very good graphics and sound capabilities. Its first incarnation, the A1000, appeared in 1985, followed by the highly successful A500 and A2000 models.

UAE is written for Unixish systems; it is developed on a Linux machine but it should compile and run on any half-recent Unix-like operating system. It has also been ported to a wide variety of machines and operating systems, including DOS, Windows 95/NT, MacOS, RiscOS, BeOS and NextStep.

UAE is free software: you are welcome to distribute copies of it and/or modify it, under certain conditions. There is no warranty of any kind for UAE. For more details concerning these issues, please read the GNU General Public License, which describes the terms under which UAE is distributed.

Features of the UAE Amiga Emulator

UAE emulates the following hardware:

A 68000/010/020/040 CPU, optionally a 68881 FPU
OCS, ECS and AGA Graphics Chipset (including sprite-playfield collisions)
Up to 2MB Chip RAM and up to 8MB Fast RAM, or 8MB Chip RAM without Fast RAM
Up to 64MB Zorro III Fast RAM, independent of Chip RAM setting (68020+ only)
Up to 1MB Slow RAM, for extended compatibility with problem software
Up to 8MB of graphics card memory, usable by software that supports Picasso 96 compatible graphics cards
4 x 3.5″ floppy disk drives (DF0:, DF1:, DF2: and DF3:). It’s not possible to read Amiga disks, so these are emulated with disk files.
A hard-disk: either a harddisk image file or part of the native filesystem
Joystick support (with option of mapping joystick to numeric keypad)
Mouse support
Ability to run in various screen modes (for better display quality or better speed)
Full stereo sound support, consisting of 4 x 8bit channels
Simple parallel and serial port support. Note: the parallel port is not really implemented. Though it’s sufficient for printing.
state-saving. you can save the state of your emulated Amiga and continue later on.
some other things which don’t work well enough to mention them here…

Hard- and Software Requirements

You need a computer running one of the supported operating systems. As a general rule, the faster your computer is, the better.

If you want to compile the source code yourself, you need an ANSI C compiler.

Apart from that, you need a Kickstart ROM image file for most purposes. Software to transfer that from your Amiga to your PC is included in the source distribution, as well as documentation on how to use it.

Please note: The Kickstart ROM is copyright 1982-1997 Amiga Corporation (formerly Hi-Toro) and its successors and licensors and we are not allowed to distribute it here.
Officially licensed Amiga ROM and OS files are available both for download and on CD-ROM as part of Cloanto’s Amiga Forever package, which includes Kickstart files up to v3.1 (the latest version).

You also need software to run on the emulator. Like a piece of hardware, an emulation by itself is not very useful.

Download the UAE Amiga Emulator

The latest version of UAE is 0.8.29.

For compilation on Unixish systems (this includes BeOS and NextStep), download the experimental source archive (2008/11/30).
For a list of updates, see the latest ChangeLog.
All UAE source code and binaries are available at GitHUB.
For a Windows version, go to the WinUAE web page.
A port of WinUAE to run on Linux again can be found with Frode Solheim’s FS-UAE.
There is also a MacOS X version of UAE available.
Richard Drummond created an experimental UAE version based on WinUAE. Go have a look at his E-UAE. E-UAE also works nicely on MacOS X and might be the better choice over MAXUAE.
Other versions have been removed here because they are completely out of date or the links stopped working. This includes versions for the following operating systems: DOS, BeOS, Acorn/RiscOS, AmigaOS, OS/2.
NOTE: If you know the latest authors and/or locations for these, please contact us and we’re going to add them again.

“Bleeding Edge” Patches for the UAE Amiga Emulator

These are additional patches for UAE which are either not ready for inclusion into the main version yet because they are still being tested, or because they are quite complex and are still being evaluated for correctness. Use at your own risk, but do report any interesting test results.

Bernie Meyer’s JIT patch ported to 0.8.21 Note: This is experimental software. It breaks just about every game and demo out there if JIT is enabled. It crashes for several applications I’ve tried. It is _not_ stable. Use it at your own risk. This only works on Linux/i386.
Wez Furlong’s MMU patch to run Linux on UAE (against 0.8.20)
bsdsocket patch created by Carl Drougge. (works against 0.8.20, if you change penguin.h to thread.h in bsdsocket.c)
Fabio Alemagna’s UAE AHI patch 0.1a (against 0.8.13)
Fabio’s UAE Speedup patch (against 0.8.11)

Useful Software for the UAE Amiga Emulator

There are other pieces of software that can be very useful when used together with UAE.

UAE can emulate a Picasso 96 compatible graphics card. OS friendly software can use this to display much better resolutions and color depths than the Amiga custom chip set would allow. To use this feature, you need the Picasso 96 software which is available on the Aminet.
ADF Opus is a file management tool for ADF files and hardfiles. It allows you to perform most common tasks (like copying, renaming, deleting, etc.) with your ADFs without having to go anywhere near an emulator. Features include support for all filesystems (including directory-caching) high speed file copying, ability to access real Amiga harddisks and an MDI interface.
ADFlib is a portable C library designed to manage Amiga formatted devices like harddisks and ZIP disks, or dump files of this kind of media via the .ADF format. ADF Opus uses ADFLib for it’s filesystem access.
Brian Wheeler has developed a Perl utility that makes it possible to access files contained in an .adf diskfile. It is available here.

Software to run in the UAE Amiga Emulator

Here you find a couple of links to archives containing test software for UAE:

If you don’t have a Kickstart, or the Kickstart doesn’t seem to work, you can have a look at the RSI Megademo (disk 1). (Don’t forget to decompress the diskfile).
Cloanto Software has licensed the Amiga operating system for distribution together with Amiga emulations. They sell the Amiga Forever package containing legally licensed ROM images and Workbench files as well as various versions of UAE and Fellow.
Magnetic Fields, Gremlin, Dark Unicorn Productions and Marc Dawson provided some of their commercial games for download at World of Classics (dead) as well as demos and music.
Ami Sector One is a great site containing legal Amiga software.
The game Katakis by Factor5 is available on their web page. You can find R-Type and BC Kid, too.
Amiga In A Box (AIAB) is a workbench distribution for UAE users.
AmiKit is another cool distribution for UAE users.
AmigaSYS is a pre-installed full Amiga OS for WinUAE, like AIAB. For install, you need a valid KickstartROM 3.0/3.1, and the image file of Workbench and Extras Disk 3.0/3.1.

Other Amiga Emulations

The first Amiga “emulation” is a hoax program for MSDOS that displays the “hand holding a disk” picture used in old Amiga ROMs and tortures the floppy stepper motor a bit. You can download this hoax program, but we make no guarantees that it does no harm to your system. It could be a virus (it’s probably safe, but I haven’t disassembled the thing, and it’s a bit large for a GIF viewer. This isn’t quite the original: for copyright reasons the Kickstart 1.2 ROM which was contained in the EXE file was removed. It runs fine even without it 😉

After that, a very nicely done GIF file appeared: NXAmiga.gif, which is also a hoax, but a much better one.

Then came UAE…

These days, UAE is no longer alone in the world. It now has a fellow: Fellow (dead), which is another Amiga emulation written by Petter Schau. As it seems, Fellow is now maintained by Dominik Schmidt and Torsten Giebl.

Like UAE, Fellow has been ported to other platforms. Get the Windows port of Fellow. More information can be found on the WinFellow homepage.

There’s a port of Fellow to Unix based platforms using X11 from Riot777. Have a look at xfellow.sf.net (dead).

Credits and Thanks

UAE was created by Bernd Schmidt, with the help of a host of volunteer contributors (in random order):
Alessandro Bissacco, Hannu Rummukainen, Andre Beck, Ed Hanway, Denis Sablic, Marcus Sundberg, Samuel Devulder, Stefan Reinauer, Marco Nelissen, Thierry Lescot, Bruno Coste, Oliver Moehrke, Per Olofssen, Tristan Cavelier, Ruben Martinez, Olivier Raoul, Markus Gietzen, Christian Schmitt, Herman ten Brugge, Tauno Taipaleenmaki, Michael Krause, Kai Kollmorgen, Stefan Ropke, Joanne Dow, Rodney Hester, Volker Zota, David Varley, Christian Schmitt, Brian King, Samuel Mackrill, Dirk Vangestel, Thorsten Frueauf, Ernesto Corvi, Gustavo Goedert, Peter Remmers, Tim Gunn, Nemo Pohle, Michael Sontheimer, Christian Bauer, Patrick Hanevold, Ian Stephenson, Olaf ‘Olsen’ Barthel, Krister Bergman, Manfred Thole, Paul Kienitz, Mathias Ortmann, Peter Teichmann, and hopefully not too many other people I’ve forgotten (complain if you are missing).

Special thanks go to:

Jay Miner, Dale Luck, R.J. Mical and all the other people whose names I don’t know who developed the Amiga in the first place.
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.
Stefan Reinauer, for hosting this web page after the RWTH decided that it’s far too dangerous to let students have their own Web pages
Bruno Coste, Ed Hanway, Alessandro Soldo and Marko Nippula provided useful documentation about the Amiga
Fabio Ciucci gets the “Best bug reports” award for his help with the blitter line emulation and other problem areas
Michael C. Battilana and Cloanto Software, for all their support
Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5, for providing several F5 games and a lot of valuable input.
Factor 5 has made Katakis, one of their classic Amiga games, freely available for download. There are still some good people left in the world…

Check out the CREDITS file of the source distribution of UAE.

Disclaimer

Amiga is a trademark of Amiga, Inc.

Microsoft, Windows, MS-Windows, Windows-NT, Windows 95, and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

NT is a trademark of Northern Telecom Limited. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions.