Some Frequently Asked Questions. Please read this carefully if you have problems. Q: Will there be a Windows version? A: I'll never write a non-commercial program for DOS/Windows again. I hate having to reboot after mistakes. I included the DOS port because a) a DOS version can achieve similar speeds as the Linux/SVGA version b) it didn't messify too much of the code, and c) more people told me they would port it to DOS and I wanted to save them the effort. I don't think a Windows port will fit in as cleanly as the DOS port, nor do I think it can be efficient. If you want, you can try to prove me wrong, but I will be very reluctant to include Windows code. The same goes for code to support a bazillion soundcards for DOS, or similar nightmares. Q: Is it possible to read Amiga disks with a PC? A: Ask that in comp.emulators.misc :-) The answer is: NO! Unless you invent and build some extra hardware yourself, which no one appears to have done yet. Q: Couldn't I attach an Amiga floppy drive to the PC somehow, and use that to read Amiga disks? A: You can attach Amiga (low-density) drives to the PC, because they are completely identical to PC drives. This won't help you, because the problem is not the drive, but the PC floppy controller. You have to live with it. Q: But... A: No way. Q: The linker says "final link failed: Bad value" A: Please upgrade your Linux installation with the latest files that you find on sunsite.unc.edu:pub/Linux/GCC, but read the release_* files carefully before you install anything. It seems that a linker bug causes this problem. The package you need is binutils-2.6.0.2 or better. Q: The assembler chokes with something about "operand doesn't match size". A: I don't know yet whether it's a bug in GCC, UAE or in the latest binutils. Try downgrading to binutils-2.6 (binutils-2.6.0.14 for Linux users). Q: What about sound emulation in the DOS version? A: Recent versions of DOS UAE support sound. Q: How can I change diskfiles? A: Read the "Installation" section in the README to find out what you need to use the X GUI. Q: The "configure" script does not find Tcl/Tk, but I have it installed! A: The script checks for an executable called "wish4.0". There is currently no better test. Unfortunately, this executable is not always present, even though Tk 4.0 is installed. If that is the case, find the "wish" executable, go into the directory where you found it and type "ln -s wish wish4.0" (provided you have write rights in that directory, i.e. you are super-user). Then go back to the UAE directory, remove the file config.cache and rerun "configure". That should do the trick. Q: Is it possible to read Amiga harddisks with a PC? A: Yes. Linux 2.0 has an Amiga filesystem that can reportedly read Amiga OFS/FFS harddisks. Since Linux 2.0.7, it's also possible to mount .adf files. Just say (for example) mount wb13.adf /mnt -t affs -o loop to mount the file wb13.adf at /mnt. You'll need to configure the loop device and the affs filesystem into the kernel, and you'll need to say yes to the question about experimental drivers at the beginning of the kernel configuration. You'll also need a reasonably new version of the mount program. Q: When UAE starts up, it says "Illegal instruction: 4e7b". Why? A: That's normal, it's just the Kickstart CPU type test. Q: When UAE starts up, it says "Illegal instruction: 00f8" (many times). Why? A: That's because your Kickstart ROM was compiled for the 68020. Q: When UAE loads it says "Non-standard sync". A: Your favourite game is copy-protected. There are ways to transfer such disks, but it's complicated and I won't help you because it would be much too time-consuming to figure out all sorts of copy-protection schemes. I hope there will be a general solution some day, but for now you're unlucky. Q: While it compiles, it says "xxx illegals generated" or "16 mismatches". Is this a problem? A: No. I can use this information to tell whether there is a problem, and there isn't. Q: Why is there a blank area on the left side of the screen? A: The Amiga can display graphics there, but usually doesn't because this would disable some sprites. The area is only used by some overscan demos. Normal screens are off-center. I'm not going to do anything about that. If you can't stand it, you can try to use 320x200 resolution, which will attempt to center the screen. This is near impossible to get right for every program. If your screen doesn't fit in 320x200, use 800x600. Q: Benchmark program gives weird results. A: Amiga programs run by the emulator think the Amiga timers can be used to measure real time. But in UAE, they only measure "emulation time". Sysinfo, for example, gives the same results on all machines. So don't run benchmarks to test the emulator speed. Some benchmarks also use tight loops of DIV or MUL instructinos to measure CPU speed, and in "emulation time" these instructions take as much time as any other instructions, and you'll get much too high values. Q: Wasn't this called the Unusable Amiga Emulator? A: Yes. But no one thought the name was very fitting anymore, though. It was only really appropriate for v0.1, which couldn't even boot. Q: Sometimes, after UAE exits, there is no autorepeat for the keys! A: Do "xset r on" (happens only in X, apparently mainly on Solaris boxes. Dunno why.). Q: Would it be possible to speed it up by emulating the CPU native on, say, a 68k Mac? A: I doubt it. UAE needs to be able to interrupt the CPU emulation anytime to perform tasks necessary for emulating the hardware. Q: Would it be possible to speed it up by using graphics accelerator boards for example by using the blitter in S3 chips? A: I doubt it. If the S3 blitter worked in similar way as the Amiga blitter, which is unlikely, it might work; but you'd have to keep all Amiga chip RAM in the graphics memory and that would most likely make everything painfully slow. Q: Wouldn't it be better to translate MC68000 code to x86 assembly? A: Yes. It would also be slightly more difficult. Q: Emulating all the hardware is a bad idea. Why don't you just emulate the OS? After all, that's what makes the Amiga the Amiga. A: Short answer: I disagree. Long answer: The OS is half of what makes the Amiga the Amiga. It is a very nice OS, and there are some features that I miss in any other OS, but it is also severely lacking in terms of (for example) memory protection and filesystem performance. The other thing that made the Amiga special back in the 1980s is the custom chip architecture. If you look into old (1985) computer magazines, you will find that the capabilites of the Amiga OS are only mentioned as a side note, because people were not aware that it was revolutionary for a home computer. They were aware, though, that the Amiga could display 4096 colors at the same time and that it had a blitter and a copper that could do all sorts of stuff, like bouncing balls for instance. And I think it was the superiority of the hardware that made the Amiga a success. I see UAE as a program that is similar to C64 emulators: it allows you to run some old games and other programs that you can't replace with better equivalents on the PC. As such, it can already be used to run non-action games (like Monkey Island or Bard's Tale) at a satisfactory speed. Faster CPUs will eventually make it possible to run action games, just like faster CPUs have made it possible to emulate a C64 at full speed on a PC. UAE is not (primarily) meant for the Amiga PowerUser who is running high quality applications on his A4000 with a 68060 board, but for people like me who switched from an A500 to the PC a few years ago because they wanted to make money by developing software. Besides, emulating an OS is far more difficult IMHO. Especially if the platform you are emulating it on is completely different than the platform that is being emulated. You'd have to mess with endianness conversions and other nightmares. The AmigaOS wasn't designed with portability in mind either. Q: How can I transfer non-DOS disks that are used by many demos? A: With transdisk. The fact that they are unreadable by AmigaDOS does not mean they are unreadble by transdisk. Only copy-protected disks can't be transferred that way.