Introduction

WinUAE essentially simulates the Amiga hardware on other computers. Just like a real Amiga, it needs a Kickstart and Workbench to function. Please read the Requirements for information about what these are and how to obtain them.
Several Amiga models have been released over the years, hence the complexity of WinUAE: it can emulate everything from the first A1000 right up to the A4000 and even the CD32 gaming console. So you need to know a little about how to configure WinUAE to emulate a specific Amiga model with their small variations in specifications such as memory, CPU, custom chipset, etc.

Basics

The first screen when running WinUAE is the Quickstart section, which offers you an extremely easy way to configure your emulated Amiga. Just select the desired Amiga model you have a Kickstart ROM for. For your convenience, a comparison table of popular Amiga models is available at the Examples page.
If using one configuration a lot, save it as default, and WinUAE will use this configuration without you having to Load it every time.

When your configuration is complete, click the Start button to start the emulation. If no hard disk or bootable floppy is found, you may see the Insert Disk screen, press F12 and click on Floppies to change the disk and click OK to restart. If the emulation crashes or fails to boot, press F12, goto Misc screen and click Reset Amiga and then OK.

When finished with the emulation you can either press Ctrl+F11, close the window, or press F12 and click Quit on the bottom left of the window.

Data Storage

Floppy Disks

  • Programs and games are usually distributed on floppy disks in a format which PC's cannot read directly. So, these disks are copied into a file called an ADF (Amiga Disk Format). To load an ADF disk, use the Floppy Drives menu entry.

WinUAE offers 4 emulated disk drives (DF0-DF3), so further floppies may be inserted at any time. Note that a few games assume there is only one floppy drive (DF0) and will only look there. If you need to change disks, press F12 to load the WinUAE GUI and click on Floppies, select Eject next to floppy drive and load the next disk. Alternatively, press END and F1, F2, F3 or F4 to change a disk in DF0-DF3.

Hard Drives

Of course, Amigas can also use Hard Drives. You can either use a normal directory on a PC hard disk to store Amiga files or you can use a hardfile, which is one big file that stores all the Amiga files together. You can also use real Amiga formatted disks as well. To access data on PC volumes, tick Add PC Drives at Startup.

  • To set up a Directory, click Hard Drives, click Add Directory, then give the disk a device name e.g. DH0, a volume name e.g. System and the location of the directory e.g. C:\AmigaForever\System for example.
  • To set up a hardfile, click Hard Drives, click Add Hardfile, under New Hard File, enter the size of the Hard file in Megabytes, anything from 10MB to 2GB is possible, click on Create, select the location and name of the hard file and click Save. You can load an existing hardfile via the Path ... button.
  • If you have a real Amiga Hard Disk, and it is connected directly to your PC, you can select it from a list via the Add Hard Drive button.

CD-ROMs

To set up a CD-ROM drive for access via WinUAE, click on the Expansions tab and enable the uaescsi.device, when you load up Workbench, you need to install an Amiga compatible CD-ROM file system such as CacheCDFS, AmiCDFS, IDEFix and so on. The device name for the CD0 DosDriver should be UAEscsi.device and the unit number is usually 0 or 1 (if unsure, enable Create Log file on the Miscellaneous page and start WinUAE to create a log file and it will tell you what your CD-ROM unit numbers are), see the Icon Information and tooltips to change these values.

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