Whilst trying to set up a serious Amiga environment under UAE I encountered many different types of problem. However, with a little perseverence I did manage to work out solutions for those problems so I decided to write this document to share them with you. This isn't a 'How to Use UAE' guide; the manual that comes with UAE serves that purpose. This document is simply to share my experiences of UAE with you!

Transferring Amiga Floppy Disks to the PC

There are two main ways to transfer your Amiga floppy disks to the PC:

When it comes to serial transfers, I have always used a piece of software called Twin Express v1.11. Although it is old and does not support long filenames on the PC I have never had any problems with it. Occasionally you may see a message such as '>>>Time-out while receiving packet data<<<' or '>>>Receiver failed to acknowledge packet data<<<' but these seem to be non-fatal and the files were always transferred without corruption.


Transferring Files from Amiga Hard Disk to the PC

As with floppy disks, there are two main ways to transfer your Amiga floppy disks to the PC:


Transferring Files with Long Filenames

Whether you use MS-DOS disks or send files across a serial cable you should be aware that long filenames will be lost (unless you are using the Amiga Explorer tool). The solution to this is to either ZIP or LHA up the files before you send them and extract the files at the PC end. I would recommend using an Amiga version of ZIP to create the archive (you may want to specify the option that turns off compression) then extract the files using WinZip. If you would prefer to use LhA to create the archives at the Amiga end then the only real choice is WinPack at the PC end as it is the only archiver that I have discovered that support LhA and long filenames. Unfortunately it can prove to be a little unstabe at times though and I have seen it truncate small files on extraction.


File System Differences

You should note that there are some filenames that are valid on the Amiga but not on the PC.

Also, small files have a tendency to take up far more disk space on the PC compared to on the Amiga (unless you use FAT32 on your PC). This is because of the difference in block size; a fixed 512 bytes on the Amiga (regardless of partition size) but proportional to the partition size on a PC (e.g. 32,768 bytes for a 2GB partition). I discovered this when I put about 8000 files (of roughly 2.5MB in total) on my PC to find that I lost 250MB of disk space!


Check the Transfer!

Configuring UAE and Fellow for Compatibility

When playing games or demos I try the Fellow emulator first as it is better than UAE for getting the emulation speed correct (on my 233MHz MMX machine). If the game doesn't work in Fellow then I give it a go with UAE as UAE's emulation is more complete. For Workbench emulation I always use UAE as it is capable of running Workbench 3.0 (requires full emulation of the 68020) and provides 24-bit support via Picasso 96.

In Fellow I have two configurations; one for floppy-based games and one for hd-installed games. The different configurations are saved under different filenames ('games.cfg' and 'hdgames.cfg') and I have batch scripts that can run Fellow for the different configurations. Each batch script just copies the appropriate configuration to 'fellow.cfg' then runs 'fellow.exe'.

The floppy-based configuration for Fellow v0.3.3 is as follows:

The hd-installed configuration for Fellow v0.3.3 only differs slightly from the floppy configuration (I've only listed the differences):

For WinUAE v0.8.6 r6, I have two basic configurations; one for Workbench use and one for games use.

My basic games configuration is:

If a game doesn't work with my standard configuration (in either Fellow or UAE), then the following tweaks can be tried:

For Workbench use, my configuration is as follows (differences to games shown in bold):

I also have a hybrid of the Workbench and Games configurations. This is for games that run from Workbench and I have listed only the differences to the Workbench configuration below:


Tuning Fellow for Performance


Tuning UAE for Performance

Setting up a Bootable System under a PC directory

The instructions below assume that you are installing Workbench 3.0 and have already transferred the five disks (Workbench, Extras, Locale, Fonts & Storage) to your PC.

cd SYS2:

copy Workbench3.0:#? "" all clone

copy Extras3.0:#? "" all clone

makedir Locale Fonts Storage

copy Devs.info Storage.info

copy Locale:#? Locale all clone

copy Fonts:#? Fonts all clone

copy Storage3.0:#? Storage all clone


Configuring Workbench

Once you have Workbench installed, you'll also need to configure it:


My Setup

Below is a basic list of what I have installed on my Amiga system under UAE:

Workbench 3.0 Configuration

Picasso96

System Software

Workbench Extensions

Commands (C:)

Utilities

Libraries

Datatypes

User-Startup

Scripts (S:)

Utilities

Games

Applications

Installing Amiga Software

Once you have transferred your Amiga floppies to the PC, installing them onto hard drive under UAE is normally a simple matter.

If the software comes in a .LHA file then I extract on the Amiga under UAE using the command 'lha -a x <filename>'.

Software that I have installed without problems includes:

Software that required a little assistance:

After migrating your Amiga to a PC running UAE, you'll find that there is lots of software that isn't required any longer:

In fact, a lot of your Amiga software can probably be replaced by better software for the PC. It's only really the things that improve the usability of the Amiga environment and the few applications that you actually want to keep that you need to install.

Also, the need for hard disk install patches isn't as necessary as the games can be run directly from .ADFs on hard disk. One of the main advantages of hard disk installation was to avoid handling floppies but you can put all of your .ADF files onto hard disk or even CD now. One of the times that they are of benefit is for games that are copy protected and therefore can't be saved as .ADF files.

Behavioural Quirks

Some pieces of software may misbehave slightly, but I have discoverered workarounds for them:

For some reason the CPU priority setting in UAE needs to be above a certain level to avoid corruption of the displayed image. Too much CPU speed (too little Custom Chip speed) causes this problem.

Without a new enough picture.datatype (probably need version 40.xx), the image didn't used to save properly.

I discovered some IFF pictures that would work on my PC but not under UAE. This was because they were compressed and needed a newer version of the ILBM datatype. I got my new version from PicDT.

Doesn't work on Picasso screens (text is garbled). I suspect that this is true on a real Amiga too. Use GoldEd instead.

This isn't really a UAE issue, but for the palette to be correct on a Picasso96 screen I needed to make some icons 256 colours (from 8).

If you give too little priority to the custom chips in relation to the CPU, ViewTek sometimes came up with an 'Out of Memory' message when using datatypes. This seems related to the ZGIF datatype problem perhaps?

Num-lock has been pressed!

Documents that link to each other don't seem to work on a PC filesystem, only on a hardfile. e.g. the Autodocs from the CATS CD.


Other pieces of software that misbehave but I can't fix:

The graphics get screwed up for some reason when zooming in/out. I don't know why.

I've never got it working properly for the Picasso96 screen modes; it tends to either crash or corrupt your Windows display. Then again, I'm not too bothered as I use my PC to browse images. If I need to view a picture under UAE I use Multiview.

Crashes Amiga under UAE (only when Picasso is switched on though).

I can't get this to run on a Picasso screen. I don't think it is possible as it is AGA only (I think).


Past Behavioural Quirks

Some bugs that have disappeared are:

Well, that's it. I hope that some of it has been of use to you!

Last Updated: 3rd January 1999