WinUAE appreciation thread for developers

[roondar]

Ever since I restarted programming for the Amiga a few years back, I've been using my PC and WinUAE as my primary development tools. Yesterday, after setting up yet another Amiga environment in WinUAE to test on I suddenly realized just how incredibly useful the ability to effectively, accurately and comfortably emulate the Amiga is for developing, well, anything.

With that in mind, I thought it would be nice to share my appreciation from a coder's perspective and invite you all to do the same. So, what about WinUAE is it that makes you happy as a coder? Which feature helps you most?

I'll start with a small list of my own:

• Built-in debugger is very useful to check hardware banging code in detail while it's running.
• Visual DMA debugger means you can actually see visually how the various elements of the custom chip set interact and use resources.
• The ability to couple a random folder as if it is an Amiga hard disk or CD-ROM is incredibly useful and time saving.
• Having many different virtual Amiga environments means you can test code on Amiga's you may not actually own. And while faster CPU's might not be emulated quite accurately when it comes to speed, you can usually see if your program will be compatible this way.
• The ability to change floppy drive speed on the fly is useful for speeding up floppy-only stuff.
• etc, etc.

[ross]

I subscribe to everything that roondar has written and I thank Toni for the incredible work he has done.
WinUAE is the reason why I started loving Amiga again

[WayneK]

Exactly as said above, during my time on Amiga "back in the day" (tm) I was too stupid to code anything - it was only coming across WinUAE many years later that re-ignited my interest in Amiga + made me want to go back and see if I could now crack all those seemingly impossibly well-protected originals and code some stuff!

Hats off to anyone who puts in the sheer amount of work + dedication necessary to continue producing such a polished/useful piece of software - cheers Toni!

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by roondar

Ever since I restarted programming for the Amiga a few years back, I've been using my PC and WinUAE as my primary development tools. Yesterday, after setting up yet another Amiga environment in WinUAE to test on I suddenly realized just how incredibly useful the ability to effectively, accurately and comfortably emulate the Amiga is for developing, well, anything.

With that in mind, I thought it would be nice to share my appreciation from a coder's perspective and invite you all to do the same. So, what about WinUAE is it that makes you happy as a coder? Which feature helps you most?

I'll start with a small list of my own:

• Built-in debugger is very useful to check hardware banging code in detail while it's running.
• Visual DMA debugger means you can actually see visually how the various elements of the custom chip set interact and use resources.
• The ability to couple a random folder as if it is an Amiga hard disk or CD-ROM is incredibly useful and time saving.
• Having many different virtual Amiga environments means you can test code on Amiga's you may not actually own. And while faster CPU's might not be emulated quite accurately when it comes to speed, you can usually see if your program will be compatible this way.
• The ability to change floppy drive speed on the fly is useful for speeding up floppy-only stuff.
• etc, etc.

I agree with absolutely every bit of this. I can't even imagine the horrors involved in making an Amiga game without using WinUAE.

Many thanks to Toni! And, to all the other people have contributed to it, over so many years. I remember when I finally sold my soul and got my first Pentium box with Windows 95, the first versions of UAE and Fellow had just become available and while they worked more or less, they were of course fairly rudimentary. Things have come on an incredibly long way, since then. To the point that it's surely one of, if not *the* best emulator of any old system we can use today.

Grab yourself a beer, Toni. You deserve it.

B

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by roondar

you can actually see visually

Just to add, that is a classic Murray Walkerism, right there. I can even hear James Hunt saying "How else do you expect people to see it, Murray?"



B

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

Just to add, that is a classic Murray Walkerism, right there. I can even hear James Hunt saying "How else do you expect people to see it, Murray?"



B

Reading a bunch of numbers also involves seeing the same info. It's just not presented in a primarily visual way. And the WinUAE visual DMA debugger does. So there

[Jobbo]

WinUAE is amazing and I love it! Definitely wouldn't be revisiting the Amiga without it.

It's incredible that it can replicate the custom hardware so closely!

I'd also like to add my appreciation for Bartman's VSCode integration, which no doubt owes a great debt to the existing development features available in WinUAE.

Thanks all!

[fxgogo]

For me, it is the glue that binds my entire Amiga set up. Without it, I would not have the flexible and fluid set of systems that can be moved across hardware setups and across emulated environments. It truly is in a class of its own.

[Antiriad_UK]

I would never have done my recent intros without it. An absolute god send.

[sparhawk]

Originally Posted by roondar

Ever since I restarted programming for the Amiga a few years back, I've been using my PC and WinUAE as my primary development tools

Same here! I have my A1000, but it's much more convenient to work on my laptop where I want.


A great tool WinUAE! Thanks!

[Ernst Blofeld]

+1

We just need to do better at supporting the ecosystem around it as well.

[roondar]

Indeed, there's so many nice tools for Amiga development these days. Might need to open another appreciation thread for some of them down the line