E-UAE 0.8.29

E-UAE is an Amiga emulator, a program that allows you to run software designed for Amiga computers on other platforms, such as Linux or Mac OS. It is based on UAE, the original Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator, and WinUAE, the Windows version of UAE. While it owes a huge debt to these two great projects, E-UAE diverges from both, aiming to improve performance and features on a variety of host platforms.

The name E-UAE stemmed from the fact that this project needed a name, and, since it was an 'experimental' version of UAE, everybody was calling it 'Experimental' UAE. While I have long since accepted that moniker, I still don't intend the 'E' to mean anything it particular. Although the project is currently 'experimental' - that is, it is a long way from being anything close to finished - it should still be robust enough to use.

E-UAE currently builds and runs - with varying degrees of supported features - on Unix and Unix-like platforms (including Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X), BeOS, AmigaOS and clones (including AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4.0, MorphOS and AROS), and Windows (with Cygwin or MinGW32).

E-UAE is open-source software and is made available under the terms of the GPL. See the COPYING file included with the E-UAE archive for details.

E-UAE is based on the work of dozens of contributors including Bernd Schmidt (the original author and maintainer of UAE), Bernie Meyer (the author of the x86 JIT compiler), Toni Wilen (the current maintainer of WinUAE), and many more.

Note that to make full use of E-UAE you will need access to an image of some version of the Amiga Kickstart ROM (although E-UAE does include a ROM emulation which may work with some old games). The Amiga Kickstart ROMs are copyrighted material and may not be freely distributed (so don't ask me for a copy). If you don't have an Amiga from which you can legally make a ROM image, a selection of ROM images are available for purchase online from Cloanto (publishers of the Amiga Forever distribution). See http://www.amigaforever.com/

What's new since 0.8.29-WIP4

New features:

• Added a command-line tool for generating blank hardfile images, called make_hdf
• Support for IPF floppy images now supported on OS X (and officially on AMD64/Linux now that libcapsimage is publically available). Go to http://www.softpres.org/ to download the plug-in.
• X-Arcade joystick supported (thanks to Robert Hurst for the patch).
• Build scripts now include a compile-time option --disable-fpu to disable building of FPU emulation.

Performance improvements:

• Some small custom chip and blitter tweaks merged from WinUAE 1.4.3.
• Some minor performance optimizations to blitter emulation, floppy controller emulation and rendering code. (Thanks to Mustafa Tufan, developer of PSP and GP2x ports of E-UAE, for a couple of these).

Bug fixes:

• Version 0.8.29-WIP4 broke the interrupt controller emulation. Fixed. This also makes Action Replay cartridge emulation work again.
• HDToolbox would hang when scanning for hard drives. Mostly fixed (I still have one unreproducible report of HDToolbox hanging).
• Hardfile emulation will no longer leak threads following a reset This also fixes crashes on exit on AmigaOS and clone hosts.
• Building on MacOS X no longer fails when building supporting tools like readdisk.
• Exiting E-UAE on OS X when started from Hi-Toro would cause 'load config file' dialog to be displayed. Fixed.
• BeOS sound driver was broken in recent changes to audio layer. Now fixed (fingers crossed).

Other:

• Removed support for 8-bit sound (since the official UAE did so).

Still to do

The following features of UAE and/or WinUAE are not yet supported yet in E-UAE. These include:

• Serial and parallel port emulation.
• AHI soundcard emulation.
• Catweasel support.
• Graphics filters, scaling, etc.
• Floppy drive sounds.

Known problems

Some significant misfeatures that I know about and am/will be working to fix (eventually):

• Only platforms supporting the GTK+ toolkit have a useable configuration GUI (and the GTK+ GUI is still incomplete). However, Mac OS X users may like to try Daniel Pimley's graphical front-end, Hi Toro. See http://www.pimley.net/projects/.
• JIT direct memory access only works on Linux/x86 and, by default, you may only emulate up to 32MB of direct ZIII RAM; select more than that and the JIT will fall back on indirect memory access and hence will be slower. This is due to a system limit on the size of a POSIX shared memory segment. You can overcome this limit my modifying the value of the procfs setting, /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax.
• Virtual filesystem doesn't support platforms which use UTF-8 for filenames (e.g., OS X, Linux with a UTF-8 locale, etc.). Filenames with characters outside of the core ASCII range will be mangled.
• OpenGL renderer is experimental, unfinished and has no error recovery.
• Tear-free graphical output (with the gfx_vsync=true option) doesn't work on most platforms yet (the exceptions being Mac OS X with the SDL/GL renderer and AmigaOS4.0 with SDL).
• The Mac OS X version is currently for PowerPC hardware only (I don't have an Intel Mac). Users with Macintel hardware may wish to try Jens Weichert's Intel builds. See http://e-uae.de.vu/.
• The build scripts are a horrible, unmaintainable mess.
• Full documentation is lacking.

Using E-UAE

Documentation is a work-in-progress. See the docs directory.

Compiling E-UAE yourself

See the docs/compiling.txt file for more information about building E-UAE.

CVS

Details about how to access the CVS repository containing the current development version of E-UAE can be found at:

http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=109723

Contact

See http://www.freelists.org/list/uae for details of a mailing list discussing problems with and development of E-UAE.

Send bug reports, comments, patches, etc. to the above list or to: Richard Drummond uae@rcdrummond.net