Amiga Emulation FAQ

Q. What do I need to emulate an Amiga?
A. An emulator program, such as UAE or Fellow, and a copy of an Amiga Kickstart ROM.

Q. Where do I get a kickstart ROM from?
A. You won't find one on this page, because the ROMs are still owned and copyrighted by Amiga Technologies. However, you can transfer the ROMs from a real Amiga with the TransROM program that come with the programs above. This either involves a serial cable link-up with a PC, or using CrossDOS to copy the image to a PC disk.

You might be able to find ROM images on some more underground emulator pages, but they're pretty scarce...

Q. What about getting Amiga games?
A. I would estimate that 90 % of all amiga games have now been converted to ADF format, as they are so easy to store, and don't take up space like piles of floppy disks do. However, these games are still copyrighted, (unless they are Public Domain ) , and it is illegal to distribute these, without concent from the author. There are many illegal sites out there, which will probably supply such games. However, my site, and the sites on the links section only supply legal software. So if you want some games, check out my games section, or the great sites in the links section.

Q. Which emulator is better?
A. Hmmm. UAE emulates all Amigas pretty well, but cannot really cope with sound. However UAE now has basic AGA emulation.Although many AGA games still refuse to run correctly on UAE, its still achievement, and emulation improves with each version. Fellow gives an accurate and speedy emulation with sound, but has less compatability and no AGA support. UAE comes for Windoze or DOS, and Fellow for DOS. The next version of fellow will be for windoze.

In a nutshell, UAE is better if you want to emulate Workbench 3.0 and later machines, and use a lot of serious Amiga software. Fellow is more suited to games, and works only with Kickstart 1.2 - 2.0. So, if you want an A1200 use UAE, and for an A500 use Fellow.

Q. What does the emulator give me?
A. The latest release of UAE is a real gem, because the emulated Amiga gets to use almost everything on your PC. You get four virtual floppy drives, CD-ROM, hard disk, AGA support and piles of RAM! With Fellow, you get four floppies and loads of RAM, but I can't get the hard drive working.

Q. How does the emulation work?
A. It's just like using a real Amiga, except to use floppies, you need copies of the disks in a file. These are Amiga disk files (ADFs). You simply assign one of them to one of the virtual floppy drives. You can insert, eject, format and write to them as you want.

Q. Can I use LHA archives with UAE ?

A. Yes - The most effective way is to setup a hard disk for your emulator using UAE. Copy the LHA file to the C Directory of your Amiga Hard Disk. Your LHA files can then be extracted to your destination. We recommend that you install D-opus onto your Amiga Harddisk, as it supports LHA archiving, allowing extraction through D-opus, rather than CLI. This is a lot simpler. LZX archiving is also supported.

Q. And DMS files ?

A. Yes, DMS extraction / compression is also supported. As long as you have a copy of DMS, you can compress and extract DMS files. Extraction will copy the file to your DF0: , so make sure you have created a new 'Blank' ADF image, which can be written to.

Q. Is there any easier way of converting DMS to ADF ?

A. Yes, - There is a cool little program called X-DMS. This file will convert your DMS in just a few seconds. It is available here and is very useful.

Q. I have Many Amiga Disks, and want to convert them. How can i do it ?

A. Read my bit on conversion, found here