What is an Amiga? What is an Amiga?
Amigas come in two variaties: the all-in-one console type with keyboard, a floppy drive in right hand side and ports at the back (like a large C64). There is the standard Desktop type like PCs. Amigas run AmigaOS with
Workbench as the interface (similar to W95 but no Start button) with menus on the screen title bar and list of drive volumes down the side. Amigas use the Motorola 680x0 series processor, and have their own custom
Chipset (Agnus|Alice, Paula, Denise|Lisa, Gary etc) which looks after graphics, sound, I/O and boots off a Kickstart ROM (like BIOS on the PC). The Amiga was THE most popular home computer in the late 80s and early 90s
before Commodore Business Machines went bust in 1993. Gateway 2000/Amiga Inc now own the Amiga. return to Amiga Archive Can a PC read Amiga floppy disks?
Sorry, it is impossible with the standard PC floppy controller. The Amiga reads floppy disks a track at a time and uses smaller inter-Sector blocks than the PC. The PC floppy controller is unable to read Amiga disks using such a system.
return to Amiga Archive Where can I get the latest Amiga emulator program?
UAE (Umiquious Amiga Emulator) Official home page is at: UAE Amiga Emulator home page. return to Amiga Archive WinUAE - What is it?
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 680x0 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.
return to Amiga Archive Fellow / WinFellow - What is it?
WinFellow is a port of Fellow for DOS to the Win32-platform (Win9x/NT/2000). Fellow is an Amiga emulator. This way you can play your old time Amiga games on your PC and run any program that ran on your Amiga.
return to Amiga Archive What software & hardware do I need to run WinUAE or Fellow?
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 which can be found in the downloads section. Alternatively, 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.
return to Amiga Archive What limitations should I expect from using an emulator?
An emulator cannot fully emulate everything on the Amiga as it has to emulate the CPU and the Custom Chipset chips as well as performance
suffers on slow machines. The latest versions of Winuae will try to use buffers for sound to improve output and JIT for extra CPU speed, Chipset
graphics is improving but 256 colours can be very slow due to the Amiga's bitmap system of using multiple layers. Using Picasso 96 emulation can
improve graphics a lot, use that wherever possible.
Emulators are improved all the time, so keep an eye out for new versions. Sound emulation can depend on your processor as well, turning it off will
improve emulation speed though.
It cannot do sprite-playfield collisions or use the MMU on higher spec'd 680x0 processors. This means that in some games the will not play correctly
do to the way tricks are used to find character hits. Also, programs that require Memory Management such as Linux or Virtual Memory will not
work in Winuae.
return to Amiga Archive What is an .adf file?
ADF stands for Amiga Disk File. This file is a exact copy of an amiga disk. They just read a disk from track 0 to track 79 and put all the data in one transferable file: the ADF-file. The file format is used by emulators such as WinUAE and Fellow.
return to Amiga Archive How do I change disks during a game or demo?
WinUAE: Press F12 / Go to floppies / eject disk / close window / press F12 again / insert new disk / close window. return to Amiga Archive Why do I have to re-configure the emulator?
Each demo, game or piece of software may have different settings or configurations dependent on when it was produced. For the software to run 100% accurate re-configuration of your emulator my need to be done.
You can find out all you need about this in the Emulator Configuration section.
Can a PC read Amiga floppy disks?
Where can I get the latest Amiga emulator program?
WinUAE - What is it?
Fellow / WinFellow - What is it?
What software & hardware do I need to run WinUAE or Fellow?
What limitations should I expect from using an emulator?
What is an .adf file?
How do I change disks during a game or demo?
Why do I have to re-configure the emulator?
If you have two floppy drives, try the new Disk2FDI program.
WinUAE for Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP can be downloaded from Emulators. Current version is 0.8.22r3
For Windows NT, you need to use Winuae 0.8.8 from Back2Roots.
Fellow can be found in Emulators, alternatively try Emulation World or the WinFellow homepage.
The current Amiga emulators can emulate a 68000, 020 or 040 processor and the OCS, ECS or the AGA chipset with WinUAE 0.8.22.
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.
Please note: The Kickstart ROM is copyrighted by Amiga International and the ROM files we provide here are purely for back-up reasons, it is assumed that you have purchased the ROM or have transferred the ROM from your Amiga.
You can write ADF-files back to your Amiga and you also can make ADF's yourself. In this way you can backup all your favorite games, play them on an emulator and write the ADF-file back to an amiga disk.
An ADF on your PC can be tranfered to your Amiga via a serial nullmodem cable. Then you can use a utility (ADF2DISK) to write it back to an original Amiga disk. Also this proces can be reversed and you can read an Amiga disk to an ADF remaining in the RAM of the Amiga. From the RAM it can be send to a PC through a serial nullmodem cable.
Information on creating your own .adf files and transfering files from Amiga to PC and vice versa is beyond the scope of this site, but tutorials regarding this subject are readily available on the internet.
Fellow: Press End+F1 to remove the disk in df0: (F2=df1: ...). Press Home+F1 to insert a new disk (german keyboard: press Pos1). Don't use F12 to change a disk, Fellow will not recognize the change otherwise