How is WinUAE tied into Amiga Forever?

[Foebane]

WinUAE is an excellent standalone downloadable emulator for the Amiga series of computers, and this version also has the most recent patches and updates, but I'm wondering what Cloanto does to it when they use it in their little package for newcomers?

My experience was that I bought Amiga Forever 2012, but always found the emulation rather bad, unstable, glitchy and just prone to crashes. As a result, I figured that WinUAE was always this way (maybe it was back in 2012, I don't know) but what really galled me was that I could not update it properly through Amiga Forever unless Cloanto (or someone else) released updates for it in the Software Director tool for such purposes.

And then I found out (well, was told, actually) that I could use the standalone WinUAE with the ROMs (however, I'm certain that one time I did, they were incredibly unstable and seemed corrupted). But that was years ago, and I've found lately, in the last year, that emulation on standalone WinUAE works much better than I've ever known it to. I was afraid of skipping / pausing video and audio for a long time but for the hundreds of demos I've run recently, I haven't seen any trace of that.

As of now, I've kept the Shared folder from my AF2012 disc (which contains WB ADFs, WB installs and HDF files as well as ROMs) and I use it as the basis of my standalone WinUAE emulation and I've never been more satisfied. So why is WinUAE on AF neutered so much?

[sturme]

I haven't had crashes like that in amiga forever, one trick you can try is to run amiga forever as administrator. it might fix your issues.

[prowler]

In the meantime, you're using your AF disc much the same as many of the rest of us use ours.

[ma693541]

If you use the default settings in the installer of AF, there's no need to run AF as a Administrator and even on a Dual-Core CPU at 1.5Ghz, AF and WinUAE should run ok with no crashes. Cloanto use the same WinUAE in their packages as we all download from WinUAE's site.

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by prowler

in the meantime, you're using your af disc much the same as many of the rest of us use ours.

+1

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by Foebane

So why is WinUAE on AF neutered so much?

I've been using AF for years and it's always worked pretty well for me. If you know how WinUAE works then at the very least it's a cheap, legal way to get the ROMs/Workbench files.

As to why it's 'neutered', AF's designed to be a 'media player' type experience and I think it serves that purpose well. I think a few things may have been added to WinUAE to enhance AF's functionality but for the most part Amiga Forever has been written around WinUAE to keep things simple.

Personally, I love the RP9 idea since it keeps ADFs, images, PDF manuals and configs all together in one file but for using a 3.9/4.1 desktop I run WinUAE standalone (AF's 'undo' feature is nifty too).

BTW, you can always update the version of WinUAE AF's using to a more recent one (even if Software Manager won't) but since AF's written around WinUAE functionality at the time of its release, it may not always work if there's been fundamental changes to WinUAE.

[Tarzin]

With Software Director activated, WinUAE is still set to 3.2.2.
Can I safely update WinUAE to 3.4.0 in with my Amiga Forever configuration?

(I tried to install OS4.1FE but I didn't succeed, maybe with last WinUAE version??)