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Boing!
How to play old Amiga games on your PC!

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Setting up WinUAE

The purpose of this guide is to setup WinUAE so that you’ll be able to play the majority of the old games – including of course all the adventures. This means that the setup is going to include only the basic configuration to emulate an Amiga 500 – some alterations will be mentioned in order to emulate a plain AGA system too. Only the items that need to be changed or checked will be mentioned. If a settings item is not mentioned it means it should be left as is by default.

After running WinUAE for the first time, it will look up all your paths and where the rom files are located. Then the Properties window with all the available settings will appear. If you don't want to use the default paths, you can change them from the Paths settings. The settings that need to be changed or checked are:

CPU: Set “CPU Type” to 68000. Some games may benefit from a higher processor (eg some Sierra games). You can experiment by selecting 68040 or 68020. If you do that, also set “CPU Emulation Speed” to “Fastest possible, but maintain chipset timing”. If you have compatibility problems, revert to 68000.

Chipset: Set “Chipset type” to “OCS”, “Misc chipset options” to “Cycle exact CPU and Blitter”, “Collision level” to “Full” and “Sound emulation” to “Emulated, 100% accurate”.

ROM: At “Boot ROM File” select Kickstart 1.3 from your roms folder.

RAM: Set “Chip” to 512 K, “Slow” to 512 K and “Fast” to “none”. Occasionally, if a game is not loading, and especially if you get low memory errors, set “Chip” to 1 MB, “Slow” to “none” and “Fast” to “1 MB”. Also, some games may benefit from higher memory (eg some Sierra games). You can experiment by selecting more “Fast” memory. Do not exceed 1 MB “Chip” memory. If you have compatibility problems, revert to initial settings (Chip/Slow/Fast = 512 K/512 K/none).

Display: This is how the games are going to appear; full screen, in a window etc. You can set it up as it suits you, but make sure you set “Refresh” to “Every Frame”.

Sound: Leave the sound options as they are by default. If you encounter sound problems in games (possible on lower machines), reduce the frequency, and try Mono instead of Stereo. Try for fun: The Amiga floppy drives were pretty noisy, especially A500’s internal drive. WinUAE gives you the opportunity to emulate the drive sounds while the games are loading!

Game & I/O Ports: Serial, Printer and MIDI to “none”. WinUAE will recognize possible joysticks or joypads that you have connected to your PC. Set Port 0 (Mouse Port) to “Mouse” and Port 1 (Joystick Port) to whatever joystick/joypad you may have, or to the kbd layout that suits you best. Port 1 will only be needed if you play a game that needs/supports joystick – old Sierra adventures supported joystick, which could be used to move your character around. Of course, if you want to play a 2-player game that requires 2 joysticks, you can set Port 0 to a joystick/joypad or keyboard layout (this will be player 2’s controls). If a mouse is needed before the game starts, in order to navigate through menus and intros, you can press F12 at anytime to bring up WinUAE’s Properties window from where you can switch from mouse to joystick and vice versa.

Misc: You can select “Use CTRL-F11 to quit” if you want – otherwise you can either quit by pressing F12 and then selecting Quit from the properties window, or by pressing Alt-F4. You can also select “On-Screen LEDs”. What this option does, is shows several LEDs at the bottom of the screen that give info on the CPU usage, the CD/HD usage and, most importantly, the floppy usage. You see, you will be emulating floppies, so the games will take some time to load – time that might seem forever when you’re used to hard drives! The floppy LEDs tell you if a game is still loading, in case you think there’s something wrong or that the emulator has crashed. The LEDs may take over part of the game screen on some games, but you can turn them on and off at will by pressing F12 and changing the setting from the Properties window.

In order to setup WinUAE as a plain AGA Amiga, do everything as above, but change the following:

CPU: Set “CPU Type” to 68EC020 and “CPU Emulation Speed” to “Fastest possible, but maintain chipset timing”. Like stated earlier, some games might benefit from a higher processor, so you can try 68020 or 68040. Revert to 68EC020 if you encounter compatibility problems.

Chipset: Same as before, but this time select “AGA” instead of “OCS” for “Chipset type”.

ROM: At “Boot ROM File” select Kickstart 3.0 or 3.1 from your roms folder.

RAM: Set “Chip” to 2 MB and “Fast” to 2 MB or more (max 8 MB); “none” for “Slow”.

Oh, and don't forget to save your settings under Configurations.

Disk Drives – Loading

Amiga could have up to 4 floppy drives connected – 1 internal and 3 external. Those were named DF0 (internal) and DF1-3 (external). Because of the different ways that Amiga and PC drives handle the disks, you cannot use Amiga disks in your PC floppy drive. So, what you will be using is disk images, which mainly come in 3 different file types: .adf, .adz, .dms. All of the drives should be set to “3.5’’ DD”. In some very rare occasions, only DF0 should be enabled, so disabling the external drives is a thing to try if a game doesn’t load – you can also disable the external drives if a game comes in less than 4 disks/image files. It is suggested that you set the “Floppy drive emulation speed” to “Turbo” for faster loading. Remember, you are emulating a floppy drive, which means games will take as much time to load as if they were actually loading from their floppy disks – and, as mentioned earlier, this may seem like forever to someone who is used to hard drives! Turbo speed makes things faster, but in some cases it’s incompatible, so if a game fails to load set the speed back to “100% (compatible)”. Also, Turbo speed might not work (games will not be loading at all) if 68040 is selected as the CPU.

To start loading a game, load its image file in DF0. If the game came on 2-4 disks, load the boot disk (usually disk 1) in DF0 and the other disk images in DF1-3 – as mentioned above, you can disable the unused external drives. If the game is more than 4 disks, load the first 4 disks in DF0 (boot disk) -DF3 and play the game normally until you are asked to swap disks. When this happens, press F12, and from the Properties window you can swap the image files at will. Note: Amiga’s drives needed to “recognize” a disk after it was inserted, so it will take a couple of seconds for the disk to be available – if you are asked to “Click to Continue” after swapping disks, wait around 4-5 seconds after you changed the image files before you do so. Also note: some games, for reasons only known to their programmers, request certain disks to be in certain drives – usually all disks swapped in DF0. If you come across such a situation, use F12 to do the disk swapping, though this is not a common occurrence.

Saving

Adventure games – which are our main focus – are useless without the ability to save. WinUAE gives you full saving capabilities – on disk images of course! Several games allow saving on the game disk itself, but others require a save disk. A save disk (as an image file) can be created by clicking on “Create Standard Floppy”. This will create an empty .adf disk image, which you can name anything you want and place anywhere you want in your hard drive – normally, in the same folder with the game. You can now insert the save disk using F12 every time you want to save. WinUAE saves directly on top of .adf images, changing the files themselves. When using an .adz or .dms image file WinUAE will not save on top of them. Instead, it creates a temp file, where it stores the changes. The temp files can be deleted whenever you want, either from within WinUAE or manually from Windows. NOTE: Regardless which drive you will use to save, make sure the “Write Protected” option is unchecked - .adz and .dms files have it checked by default.

In Conclusion

Although I still own an A500, an A1200 and the original A1000, I couldn’t help but dance in glee the first time I ran WinUAE and started to play the old Amiga games on my PC screen! I’m sure that old Amiga users who have not used WinUAE before will soon be doing the same! For those who never had the pleasure of an Amiga experience in the past, this is the opportunity to do so! Hope this guide was helpful. Happy AMIGA gaming – and adventuring!

Macintosh

This article only covers Amiga emulation for the PC. Mac users can visit http://www.thinkcommodore.com, a very well written site for Amiga and Commodore emulation information.

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