This page describes the changes in FS-UAE between version 2.0 and 2.2.

Improved FS-UAE Launcher UI

There’s now a preferences dialog with access to the most common settings. The Launcher layout has been slightly improved as well, and there’s a new menu toolbar button to contain less commonly used functions.

A tool for creating ADF and HDF’s is included.

The experience when starting FS-UAE Launcher for the first time should be improved as well. You’ll get a nice warning box in the top-right corner if official kickstart files are not found. A bug has also been fixed where you could get an error message about missing kickstart after just having imported kickstarts and tried to start the emulation.

Updated Emulation Code

The emulation code is updated from WinUAE 2.5.1, bringing with it the usual improvements in emulation accuracy thanks to the great work of Toni Wilen 🙂

Better Stability, Better Performance

Several fixed have been made to improve performance, and some bugs which could cause crashes have been fixed.

More Keyboard Shortcuts

• F12 + m to mute the sound.
• F12 + w to toggle warp mode (no frame limit, no audio). This does not affect the emulation accuracy, it only removes the pauses between generating frames.
• F12 + comma to decrease the volume.
• F12 + period to increase the volume.
• F12 + P or Pause/Break key to pause the emulation.

Improved Support for Directory Hard Drives

Amiga file attributes (file permissions, date/time and file comments) are now stored in directory hard drives. The metadata is stored in .uaem files alongside the files the metadata belong to. This feature is described in more detail here, but the bottom line is that directory hard drives can now be used also when then Amiga software require specific file attributes.

Initial Support for the Open Amiga Game Database

When you enable support for the Open Amiga Game Database (OAGD), you’ll be able to scan your floppy disks and have game entries automatically appear – with correct settings, and cover / screenshots appear automatically (downloaded on demand).

Several hundred games are already added 🙂 You can access the online database at https://oagd.net and to get a better impression of it. The best part is that anyone can submit fixes and improvements!

This feature is still in beta, and must be enabled in “Experimental Features” in FS-UAE Launcher settings. Also, during the beta, access is restricted to beta users. See database for more information, and how to get beta access!

More Input Options

Auto-fire support for joysticks is now available. There’s an auto-fire toggle mechanism ub F12 menu, new boolean options joystick_port_x_autofire. Additionally, the “left trigger” gamepad button toggles auto-fire and a on-screen message is displayed when auto-fire mode is toggled.

Support for Amiga mouse wheel and middle mouse button is added (an option to prevent FS-UAE from using the middle mouse button to toggle input grab is also provided).

Unrecognized Joysticks / gamepads are now automatically configured for Amiga. For CD32 gamepad support, gamepad devices still need to be configured so the button mapping will be correct.

Left and right mouse buttons are aliased to joystick port 0 fire and 2nd button (unless joystick_port0_mode is nothing, or mouse is already used in a port). This means that you can in many cases also use the mouse buttons to skip through cracktros when you have configured two joystick devices.

Other new options available: swap_ctrl_keys, mouse_speed.

Amiga PAL/NTSC Mode Switching

FS-UAE will now handle it much better when the Amiga changes refresh rate, and will automatically enable/disable full video sync as necessary (FS-UAE does not yet try to change the host video mode).

Better Shader and Theme Support

FS-UAE now supports some RetroArch extensions to the XML shader spec, as a result,
the CRT-interlaced-halation shader works now. Additionally, the XML shader support was improved with better compatibility.

Some new shaders are included: scanlines-classic (same as scanline CPU filter, but more efficient since it runs on the GPU), scanlines-nonlinear (a scanline shader which varies with pixel), and scanlines-nonlinear-blur (which also adds some horizontal interpolation). See this thread for some tips regarding the use of scanline filters/shaders.

FS-UAE scaling and zooming features now work much better when you use the low_resulution = 1 and line_doubling = 0 (you will likely want to use these options when using pixel-enhancing shaders).

Theme coordinate system can be defined with theme_width, theme_height, so you can better tune themes to a specific resolution.

Support for displaying more dynamic LEDs in themes:

• New LED overlays for HD, CD, Power and CDTV/32 memory access
• New LED overlays to display vsync, FPS and audio status.

This forum thread has more information about the new theme options.

Improved WHDLoad Support

FS-UAE Launcher will now automatically, by itself, assemble a minimal hard drive when launching an archived WHDLoad game.

WHDLoad.key will be included if it is stored as Documents/FS-UAE/WHDLoad.key (note, the location has changed from FS-UAE 2.0). The old directory Documents/FS-UAE/WHDLoad is no longer used.

If you have a Workbench 3.0 disk indexed by the Launcher scan function, SetPatch will be automatically extracted and included in the hard drive, and SetPatch will be run in the startup sequence before starting WHDLoad games. If SetPatch wasn’t found, the startup sequence will print a warning.

Save states are currently disabled when running archived WHDLoad games -or in fact when using zipped hard drives in general. These hard drives are not yet compatible (enough) with save states, and you can in some cases get save state corruption when combining these two features. If you need to load an existing state, you can override this safety feature by setting unsafe_save_states = 1 in custom settings in FS-UAE Launcher.

LHA Archive Support

The Launcher now supports indexing and using archives in .lha format. If you use the Windows or OS X version, the lha support is already included. For other platforms, you need to have the lhafile python extension installed.

Improved Support for Amiga Forever

A two-byte difference will be automatically patched, so players can use amiga-os-130.rom together with other players using a real A500 rom file net play mode.

On Windows, FS-UAE Launcher should also automatically detect / use the installed kickstarts from Amiga Forever when you start FS-UAE Launcher without any kickstarts in the “Kickstarts” folder.

New Structure for Saving State Also With FS-UAE

Saved games are now stored in sub-directories under “Save States” by default, also when using FS-UAE with the Launcher. The old directories “Floppy Overlays” and “Flash Memory” are no longer used. The sub-directories are named after the configuration, and  the following is saved there:

• Save states
• Modified floppy images
• CDTV/CD32 memory
• Changes to zipped hard drives (when using FS-UAE Launcher)

This is clearly a change for the better, as all state for a configuration is stored in one place – and you get a separate set of save states for each configuration. But it also means that you must manually move / copy som save data to the new directories if you have saved state from 2.0 which you want to use with 2.2. If you use FS-UAE Launcher, the state should already be stored like this.

More Platforms Supported

Fixes have been added to allow compilation on OpenBSD. FS-UAE should now compile and run on Windows, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

The Windows version now also implements bsdsocket_library support (was already available for other platforms in 2.0).

More Languages

In addition to the languages already supported, translations have been added for:

• Czech
• Finnish
• Portuguese
• Spanish

Other Improvements and Fixes

These are just some of the improvements in this version. For a complete list of changes, please see the changelog entries for the 2.1.x development versions.