FS-UAE Features

FS-UAE running Lotus Turbo Challenge 2

FS-UAE is an Amiga emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OS Xbased on UAE/WinUAE, with a focus on emulating games, though it also emulates high-end Amigas.

Features include emulation of Amiga 500, 500+, 600, 1000, 1200, 4000, CD32 and CDTV, perfectly smooth scrolling on 50Hz displays, support for floppy images in ADF and IPF formats, CD-ROM images in ISO or BIN/CUE format and mounting folders on your computer as Amiga hard drives.

The emulator uses the latest Amiga emulation code from the WinUAE project and requires a moderately fast computer with accelerated graphics (OpenGL) to work. A game pad or joystick is recommended, but not required (FS-UAE can emulate a joystick using the cursor keys and right ctrl/alt keys).

Accurate Emulation

FS-UAE integrates the most accurate Amiga emulation code available from the WinUAE project.

On-Screen GUI With Joystick Control

Opened the on-screen menu while playing Lemmings

FS-UAE is fully controllable with a gamepad, with an on-screen GUI, which means that you can easily swap floppies and load save states with your gamepad. In addition to being great on your personal computer, FS-UAE is also well suited to be started from an emulator frontend running on a HTPC.

The screenshot shows the on-screen GUI. From here, you can (among other things) change input options and insert floppy images. The 3D effect is only active while in menu mode, of course.When playing the game, the game occupies the entire window.

Configuration GUI

FS-UAE Launcher running in GNOME 3 on Linux

FS-UAE includes an easy-to-use graphical configuration program which allows you to enjoy FS-UAE and Amiga emulation without writing configuration files. Using this program is optional, and if you are a minimalist, you can instead use just FS-UAE alone.

Good Joystick and Gamepad Support

FS-UAE recognizes and supports many joysticks and gamepads out of the box without any configuration, with correct setup both for Amiga and CD32. Support for additional models can be configured with the joystick configuration tool bundled with FS-UAE Launcher.

Video Synchronization

FS-UAE can synchronize to your 50 Hz monitor (for PAL Amiga emulation) or 60 Hz monitor (for NTSC Amiga emulation). When the video is synchronized, you get perfect scrolling in games without the micro-stuttering which will otherwise occur. FS-UAE can synchronize with your display on all supported operating systems.

Great Scaling and Video Options

FS-UAE uses OpenGL for video output, and there are many options to tweak how the Amiga display is shown on your screen. By default, the Amiga display stretches to fill your monitor, but you can enable aspect correction, zoom in or out, enable OpenGL shaders for advanced effects, and use visual themes.

Open Amiga Game Database

FS-UAE Launcher integrates with the Open Amiga Game Database (OAGD). This allows FS-UAE to scan your Amiga game files and automatically create game entries for recognized ADF, IPF and WHDLoad games. The games will be automatically configured, and FS-UAE Launcher will also download covers and screenshots from OAGD.net.

Emulate High-End Amigas

FS-UAE supports emulating an Amiga 4000 with an CPU as fast as your system can emulate it. Picasso96 drivers can be used with the built-in UAEgfx card to display Workbench in high resolutions and with up to 16.7 million colors, and the built-in bsdsocket.library means that the Amiga will have access to the Internet.

Available for Multiple Operating Systems

FS-UAE works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Apart from a few small differences, the feature set is the same on all platforms.

Cross-Platform Online Play

A unique feature is support for cross-platform online play. You can now play Amiga games against (or with) friends over the Internet. The online play feature is designed in a way which avoids de-synchronization issues.

Available in Multiple Languages

Both FS-UAE and FS-UAE Launcher are translated into several languages. The currently supported languages are French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, and Serbian. -In addition to English, which is the default language.

Flexible Screenshot Support

When you take a screenshot in FS-UAE, by default you get three different images saved to your screenshots folder. One is the real screenshot (the scaled graphics you see on screen), but FS-UAE also saves a 1:1 pixel image of the entire Amiga video output, and also an 1:1 image which is cropped to what you see on screen.

Built-In Support for WHDLoad

If you have archived WHDLoad games in .zip or .lha, you can launch many of them by simply adding the archive as a hard drive. FS-UAE Launcher will recognize that it is a WHDLoad game, and automatically configure an “internal hard drive” to boot and launch the game for you.

Open Source

FS-UAE is free software and is licensed under GPLv2 (other parts / dependendent libraries are licensed under LGPL or other open source licenses). Source code is available on the download page, and parts of the FS-UAE project (including the emulator itself) have public git repositories.

Online Documentation

A great deal of documentation about how to use and configure FS-UAE is available on fs-uae.net.

Community Support

There is a support forum for FS-UAE on the English Amiga Board with many active registered users. If you are stuck, you’ll almost certainly get an answer to your questions there. You can also leave comments on fs-uae.net is you rather want that.

32 thoughts on “FS-UAE Features

  1. I’d almost given up on Amiga emulation on my laptop. Despite it being more than capable of running the latest titles, for some reason all the later versions of WinUAE just were not happy. Sound buffer issues and crawling frame-rate made me think I was never going to get to play Turrican 2 again, but FS-UAE is absolutely fantastic! Great performance in windowed mode or fullscreen, you have revived my love of the amazing Amiga! Thank you!

    • Laptops have little utility for power preservation, that throttle idle power down to 5% (default for Win10)

      Go to power options, advance edit and change CPU power to higher number while connected to power source.

  2. Great Job! Thanks very much! At last a modern Amiga-Emulator for Unix. And it has Disksound… Amazing! 😀

  3. Thanks, I am still using an Amiga 2000 with a 68040 card, but because of the extra calculations I have to make it is getting too slow to be practical. I got over 20 years use out of it, so it doesn’t owe me anything.

  4. I am not a gamer, but I still use maxiplan to run a small business. Will maxiplan and Superbase work in the emulator?

  5. Probably a Noob question but how do I get the LED lights to show up when there is disk activity, do I need to amend the Config file?

  6. FS UAE works great on my iMac.
    But, if i start a workbench install i have to change disks. kan you give me a HOW TO DO, Please. i try some ways but no one work.

  7. Could you please add armhf builds to your ppa? For those of us with the arm chromebook you’d be a hero. Both the regular uae and e-uae from the default repos run on armhf, so afaik it shouldn’t be hard but I really have no idea.

    • Hi, it would probably run on armhf – I did some ARM fixes when I patched FS-UAE to run on Android (for testing purposes). However, I don’t think I can just choose to add armhf builds – as far as I can tell, only amd64 and i386 builds are created by launchpad, and special permissions are needed to have packages compiled for other architectures :-/

    • Hi, you can remap keys manually, but the easiest way to solve just that problem is to use the option to swap left and right ctrl keys. Then, the left ctrl key will control the fire button instead. FS-UAE Launcher has a GUI selector for this option in Preferences 🙂

  8. Finally an almost perfect Amiga emulator for Mac OSX platform! I waited so long for it.
    Keep up the awesome work. 🙂
    Just a little suggestion: some old MacBook (like mine) hasn’t the right ALT key on its keyboard layout, so joystick emulation is a bit tricky for the average user. What about a GUI oprion to remap joystick buttons?
    Thanks.
    Greetings from Italy.

    • Yes, providing out-of-the-box support for every computer is a bit challenging, when the the emulated Amiga uses so many of the available keys for itself. I did make one feature, possible for this use case (don’t remember exactly) – there is a “swap ctrl keys” option in FS-UAE Launcher preferences. This will allow the left ctrl key to be used as fire instead. I should add info about this to a OS X-specific getting started-page.

      A more general remap GUI than what it available now is of course useful for novice users, and it may very well be implemented in time 🙂

  9. Awesome! I’ve been waiting for good Amiga emulator for ubuntu for a long time! Thankyou! This is great! I just wanted to try it, but ended up playing Midnight Resistance for 3 hours….

  10. A big thanks for this awesome piece of work! I use Ubuntu, but had to still boot into Windows to get my Amiga fix (UAE on Linux is just so lacking…), but this is just amazing! The launcher is great and after a little messing around i got my PS3 controller working sweet as well (the buttons are even preset great!!).

    Keep up the great work! This is a very slick and well presented package! 🙂

  11. Absolutely amazing Amiga emulator, the best I have ever tried.
    I really appreciate the linux support (using it with xubuntu 12.10 right now). Can’t stop, need to return to it, right now.

  12. Thank you!!!
    This is, what I need for my little computer under my TV. 🙂
    Simple configuration is all, if the screen not on the table near in front of the chair.
    Config and play only over gamepad is the very best way, if the player sitting on the couch… super! 😀

  13. Finally! I can enjoy Amiga for the first time! Execellent piece of software. Best emulation of Amiga on OS X! Elite Frontier with Amiga 4000 is amazing!

  14. Thank you very much !
    Impressive for a newest amiga emulator, works fine on opensuse, I waited a long time for a good amiga emulator for linux.
    I look forward to future releases

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