PC World 1999 June

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Some Frequently Asked Questions. Please read this carefully if you have problems. ** COMMON PROBLEMS 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.). [Should be fixed by now. Note that this always happens when UAE crashes] 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. (could also happen when there's a bug in UAE) Q: When UAE loads <insert your favourite game> 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: How can I produce an @ symbol (or any other sign)? On my PC keyboard it's AltGr+Q, but that doesn't seem to work. A: Look at the keyboard of your Amiga. Use the same combination that you would need on a real Amiga. These combinations differ across countries. Make sure you have loaded the right keyboard translation table for AmigaOS (e.g. in Germany, make sure there's a "setmap de" command in the startup-sequence) You can probably create a @ sign by pressing Alt+2, or Shift+2. ** INCOMPATIBILITIES Q: UAE does not work with my Kickstart 1.2 image. A: You may need to turn off the harddisk and fastmem emulation with the "-a" parameter. Kick 1.2 doesn't support the autoboot features that the harddisk emulation requires. You can tell that you are suffering from this problem if UAE gives you the message "filesys_bput called". Q: What do I do if a game/demo/application doesn't work? A: If you're trying to run a game or a demo, enable some slow RAM, and try running it again. Some older software has compatability problems which slow RAM can sometimes fix. If it's an application, check for obvious things like Kickstart version requirements, RAM, etc. Also make sure the software you're trying to run isn't for AGA equipped machines. You can also try changing various other options, like the CPU type. For games, sometimes "-C0c" will make it work. ** AMIGA DISKS, DISK IMAGES, HARDDISKS, CDROMS Q: Is it possible to read Amiga disks with a PC? A: No, and yes. No, with a standard PC it's impossible. However, with some additional hardware (i.e. a new floppy controller) it is possible. I currently know of two solutions, the AFR package which consists of a small parallel port interface that you have to build yourself and some software, and the Catweasel controller which is available as an ISA card and comes with DOS software that can create disk files. I have a Catweasel here, and it does in fact work. 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 the PC can read 11-sector formats! A: Yes, but those sectors look a little different to the hardware. Q: But the Amiga can read PC disks! A: So what? Q: But the PC can read Atari ST disks! A: So what? Q: But... A: No way. If you still are convinced that it must be possible, prove it. Write a program to read Amiga disks with a standard PC controller, and I will apologize in public. Q: How can I use DMS images? A: Run DMS under UAE and use it just like you would on a real Amiga. Decompressing a DMS file to DF0: will overwrite the .adf file that is currently used to emulate df0:. 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. Long explanation: There are two things to consider when talking about the "format" of a disk. First, the low-level format which divides each track into sectors in a special way. Most Amiga disks are in the standard Amiga format which has 11 sectors with 512 bytes each per track, with a total of 880K per disk. There's also some extra information outside the sectors so that the floppy controller can find the sectors. PC disks use a different format, which is the reason why a PC controller can't read Amiga disks. If a disk is formatted this way, it can be copied with the normal AmigaDOS diskcopy program or the Workbench equivalent, and transdisk can handle it. Copy-protected disks have a different track layout (sometimes, they don't divide the tracks into sectors at all, or use more sectors, or put different things between the sectors. This type of thing can't be handled by diskcopy or by transdisk. Now, the second part of the "format" of a disk is the filesystem. If you want to put files and directories on a disk, you have to write some special information into some of the sectors on the disk. That information includes (for example) the name of the disk (e.g. "Workbench1.3"), and what files it contains. This information is called a "filesystem". The Amiga knows about several filesystems: There is the original filesystem (called OFS), and the newer Fast Filesystem (FFS) which was introduced with Kickstart 1.3. If you don't put a filesystem on the disk, the data in the sectors can still be read by programs like transdisk or diskcopy, but the data makes no sense to them. The point is, it doesn't have to. It only has to make sense for the Workbench which tries to determine what files there are on a disk. If the Workbench can't find a filesystem it knows about on the disk, it will be marked as a non-DOS disk (as opposed to an "unreadable" disk which you get if the low-level format is different from the standard). Q: How can I change diskfiles? A: Your version of UAE may have a user interface (the X11 version does) which enables you to do this. Read your system-specific README file for details. You can also use the "uaectrl" programs from the "amiga" subdirectory. Q: Why is the floppy emulation so slow, after all the disk image is on a harddisk? A: Because the disk rotation is emulated. This is necessary. Use the harddisk emulation wherever possible. Q: <insert your favourite problem with the hardfile emulation here> A: Don't use the hardfile. Use the filesystem emulation ("-m" option). Q: How can I read Amiga CD-ROMs? A: With the harddisk emulation. Give UAE the parameter "-M CD:/cdrom" if you are using a Linux system with the CD mounted at /cdrom, or "-m CD:D:\" if you are using DOS and D: is your CD-ROM drive (and if you have a different system you should be able to figure out what to do) 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. Please don't ask for details, I didn't write the thing, and I don't use it (yet). I did use it to read .adf disk images, though. ** FUTURE PLANS Q: When will the next version come out, and what will be in it? A: It will come out when it's done. Q: Will there be a shareware version or some registration fee for future versions of UAE? A: No. Q: Couldn't you use ARDI's CPU emulation to speed it up? A: UAE is free software. It comes with sourcecode. ARDI's Executor is proprietary and sold commercially. ARDI has no reason at all to give away their code for free, because they wouldn't make any more money if they did. (yes, I really get asked this kind of thing! I don't know where people take these ideas from). ** UAE SPEED Q: I don't get steady sound output! I only have a 486DX40, could this be related? A: Try a Pentium-II-300, these things are reported to do better. 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. So you can't just let it run all by itself. 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. I'm no PC graphics card expert, but probably the only thing the S3 blitter and the Amiga blitter have in common are seven lowercase letters. Even if they were similar you'd have to keep all Amiga chip RAM in the graphics memory and that would most likely make everything painfully slow. Q: How about adding special support for the GUS/other wavetable boards that uses hardware features to speed up the sound emulation? A: Again, due to the differences in Amiga and PC (in this case: GUS) hardware, this isn't really feasible. You _might_ get something like this to work in some special cases (ProTracker modules might be a case that could be made to work), but I don't think you can come up with something that emulates all of the Amiga sound hardware. The problem is that by just examining the values a program writes into the audio hardware registers, you can hardly figure out what a program is trying to do, and what it is going to do in the future. In contrast to that, it's easy to write a SoundTracker module player for GUS cards because you know exactly what you are playing, and how you have to do it. (That doesn't mean you can't use the GUS for sound output; you just can't use it to _speed up_ the sound output) 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 fast is it? A: It depends. For crunching files with PowerPacker, UAE is 17 times faster than my A500 on my K6-233. For playing Turrican I, it's running at about full speed (with sound). For playing Turrican III, it is slightly slower than the A500. For some (not many) demos, it's a fair bit slower than the A500. Rule of thumb: Sound emulation really takes time; so do copper effects and scrolling. If you don't need either, you're fine. Q: How can I make it faster? A: Run the emulator in the lowest screen mode (320x200), set it to 256 colors, make sure aspect correction is disabled, and set the frame rate to every 3rd frame. Finally, disable sound (if you have a version that lets you compile your own executable, set "DONT_WANT_SOUND" in config.h). It won't look very nice, but it will run as fast as your machine allows. If you are running the X version, make sure you use the "-T" option. Not using this option is "safer", but makes the emulator very slow. Even better, when you run configure, say "configure --enable-dga" if your X server (XFree86 3.2 or higher) supports it. It's especially important that you don't use 24 bit or 32 bit color modes. ** MISCELLANEOUS Q: Do I need a real Amiga to use this program? A: Yes, unless you have some other way of legally getting ROM files and system software, such as the Cloanto Amiga Forever CD. Q: Where can I download a Kickstart ROM/Amiga games? A: Read the docs again. You can't. It would be illegal to put a ROM image or other copyrighted software on the net (yes, even if you once bought a specific Amiga game and sold it together with the computer, downloading the same game now would still be illegal. Sorry.) Q: Does UAE run on the DEC Alpha/Sparcstations/SGIs/whatever? A: UAE should run on all Unix systems that have at least X11R5 and a decent C compiler installed. So the answer is probably yes. Just use the generic Unix source and follow the instructions in README.UNIX to compile it. However, using GCC and the GNU binutils can improve your chances. 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 or 640x480 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 lower resolutions, use 800x600. Q: Where is a complete summary of all command line switches ? A: In the README files. You can also generate it yourself by typing: uae -h > uae-help.txt Q: Benchmark program <insert your favourite benchmark> 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 instructions 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. If you enabled the "HAVE_RDTSC" option, running benchmarks makes some more sense. Still not a lot, since there is a minimum speed that the benchmark will report on every machine. The faster the machine, the more accurate will your results be. 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.