I use Mac emulators, DOS emulators, ZX Spectrum emulators, etc. This is normally easy. A sensible modern emulator is a bit like a modern VM: it takes a guess at how many resources your host can give, takes big gulps of RAM and disk that won't hurt, sets sensible defaults and asks "where's the media to load from?" and you're in business.
Amiga emulators by comparison:
Ah hello! Would you like to try an Amiga app? Certainly sir. White, red, rosé, sparkling, or dessert? Which decade? North, south, east, or west facing slope or level? Dry season, or moist, or varied? Would sir prefer very small, small, medium, large, half bottle, or a full bottle? What colour would sir like the glass of the bottle? What material for the label? What type of closure? What material of the cork? What shape of drinking glass would sir like? Round or tall or thin or wide, long stem or short stem?
And until you answer them _all_, with suitable answers that match the other answers, and no hints are given, then nothing happens. 10 minutes of going through 50 successive dialog boxes, and then it says it can't save.
It was _horrific_.
I know the Amiga was a complex machine. I know it spanned from a slowish 68000 to fast 68060s. I know it could take from 256kB of ROM to 4GB or something.
But don't ask me. Set some defaults, aim high and then look at the media and what's on it and adjust down if it is some weird game that won't start if it sees more than 0.5MB RAM.
The configuration is indeed daunting for a beginner.
Perhaps one could set up some reasonable WinUAE (or whatever) configuration and use WHDLoad from the Amiga OS itself? You can have all the memory you want and mostly it works with a much faster CPU as well.
WHDLoad is a much less painful way to play Amiga legacy games. Quick loading times and can cleanly exit back to the Workbench as well.
There are menu systems for launching practically any Amiga game that way in a matter of seconds.
There are also premade hard disk images that have everything preinstalled, including the games.
What’s the UX like winUAE these days?
I remember years ago finding it very confusing, having to choose the specific Amiga, and simulate specific disk loads.
For me, I just wanted to be able to quickly and easily load up and play the old Amiga games I used to love.
Is that possible yet?
Not tried 6, but I tried every free Amiga emulator I could find researching this article:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/amigaos_3_2_3/
I use Mac emulators, DOS emulators, ZX Spectrum emulators, etc. This is normally easy. A sensible modern emulator is a bit like a modern VM: it takes a guess at how many resources your host can give, takes big gulps of RAM and disk that won't hurt, sets sensible defaults and asks "where's the media to load from?" and you're in business.
Amiga emulators by comparison:
Ah hello! Would you like to try an Amiga app? Certainly sir. White, red, rosé, sparkling, or dessert? Which decade? North, south, east, or west facing slope or level? Dry season, or moist, or varied? Would sir prefer very small, small, medium, large, half bottle, or a full bottle? What colour would sir like the glass of the bottle? What material for the label? What type of closure? What material of the cork? What shape of drinking glass would sir like? Round or tall or thin or wide, long stem or short stem?
And until you answer them _all_, with suitable answers that match the other answers, and no hints are given, then nothing happens. 10 minutes of going through 50 successive dialog boxes, and then it says it can't save.
It was _horrific_.
I know the Amiga was a complex machine. I know it spanned from a slowish 68000 to fast 68060s. I know it could take from 256kB of ROM to 4GB or something.
But don't ask me. Set some defaults, aim high and then look at the media and what's on it and adjust down if it is some weird game that won't start if it sees more than 0.5MB RAM.
Utter disaster area, IMHO.
The configuration is indeed daunting for a beginner.
Perhaps one could set up some reasonable WinUAE (or whatever) configuration and use WHDLoad from the Amiga OS itself? You can have all the memory you want and mostly it works with a much faster CPU as well.
WHDLoad is a much less painful way to play Amiga legacy games. Quick loading times and can cleanly exit back to the Workbench as well.
There are menu systems for launching practically any Amiga game that way in a matter of seconds.
There are also premade hard disk images that have everything preinstalled, including the games.
You'd probably be better off with the PUAE core under Retroarch, or some other libretro front-end.
Agreed. Last time I tried, I spent an hour trying to run Cannon Fodder and failed. I'd love to hear if that's improved.
The default Amiga 500 configuration can handle that.
Point winuae to kickstart rom dir, insert the cannon fodder floppy images into the virtual drives and fire it up. It just works.
But it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with the Amiga.
https://dirkwhoffmann.github.io/vAmiga/
Not great, but a bit better than FS-UAE. Amiberry has a much more logical UX, though it's still a bit cluttered.
I wish the Kickstart ROMs and the Amiga OS source would be released as open source.
I did buy a copy, but ..
Ideally the copyright would have expired already... So nobody would have to open source it to begin with.