A Small Tutorial For All Amigians who want to have fun on their PCs at work.

Well, it is generally more than easy, but as we really got a lot of e-mails from various Amiga- and PC-sceners asking how to install and run this famous PC tool after the release of JP#1o, or even requesting a whole tutorial, we thought to realize at least a small introduction to the basic configuration and the essential needs to make Jurassic Pack running and publish it here in JP itself and online on our website of course.

The first thing is the download. And then you should depack and install one version of WinUAE. (We prefer "uae0817 R3", but if you want to you can use one of the newer versions of course, although they have more bugs than before. The developer team has changed after 0817R3 and they embedded new audiocode which isn't that good.)

Okay, you have installed your version? Now just copy the Amiga Kickstart Roms (you surely got from somewhere or have to strip from your original Amiga with the tool TransROM) into ".../winuae/roms/" or where you are going to load them from later. (We recommend to give them fitting names like AmigaROM31.rom for example!) Afterwards you should create a drawer (somewhere in the WinUAE directory is not without sense) that will become your virtual harddrive! Yes, no partitioning or formatting is needed!

Now it is time to start WinUAE and set your personal configurations (different ones will be useful to emulate the different Amiga models - from A1000 to A1200). The best would be to re-think what you want to use the emulator for. If you just want to play games from the good old times, a 68000 with DOS1.3 (matching to A500) in OCS (lores) & 8bit with 512kb or 1MB Chip Ram and 512k slow Fast Ram (also known as Ranger Memory) and no harddisk should be enough. If you prefer watching demos from around 1993 you should configure an A1200 with 68020, 2MB Fast, AGA and maybe a harddisk featuring the Workbench 3.1 installed. But if you really want to work with WinUAE as if it were an upgraded Amiga model, you should set the best hardware available. That is OS3.1, as much RAM as possible, a big harddisk (you can even install OS3.9 later and it will work well!), a 040 processor, gfx-card, soundcard in 16bit and activate JIT of course.

Of course you can and have to play a bit around with those configs as not all games, demos or whatever will work with every configuration. Do not blame the coders of WinUAE for this. Always remember that no emulation can replace a real thing!!!

Now you should put some software on your harddisk thereby it makes sense besides gaming only. (If you want to do so, you are only one step away from your target: You just have to get the DMS or ADF files of these games and select them in the floppy configuration - they can be treaten as if they were real floppies - and boot!) For well working under the AmigaOS, you need to install the Workbench and some other tools. Therefore you need to smash your original disks with DMS or TransADF on your Amiga and get them to your PC in any way. Then you have to boot from these disks, as written above in the game note, while having additionally selected also a harddisk in WinUAE. Then simply install the disks to this harddisk as you formerly did on your Amiga years ago and voila you have a working Amiga system.

For single productions - like our Jurassic Pack - you could simply depack them in an own drawer somewhere on your PC harddisk and select this one to boot from. Afterwards simply execute Setpatch in the CLI/Shell and then the wanted executable (gallery, intro or the mag itself). Do not forget that JP needs at least OS3.0, AGA and 4MB of free FastMEM to run.

That is all! You can easily treat WinUAE like your real Amiga (that is what an emulator should provide) you simply have to know that the ROMs have to be selected as files and that floppies are not physical but emulated by DMS or ADF files, but can be treaten the same way. At last you can quit WinUAE with "AltGR+F11" or change the config by pressing "F12" while WinUAE is running...

As mentioned of course also OS3.9 runs very well and you can do nearly everything (also use sound- and gfx-cards, internet, sound programming and much more) although WinUAE can of course not replace a real Amiga. But the general limit is just a 040 processor and your patience for finding the suitable configurations.

Some additional information if you want to transfer the content of your old Amiga harddisks to your PC you have several possibilities:

a) If you still have a working Amiga at your disposal, the fastest approach is to plug in your PC harddrive to your Amiga. The only thing you need is a filesystem which is able to handle Windoze files. We used the 'Fat95' filesystem which can be found on Aminet and we never had any problems with it.

b) If you don't want to open your holy PC you could also set up a serial link connection between your Amiga and your PC but this is only useful for small files because of the rather slow speed.

c) If you have an Amiga equipped with a CD-Writer, the easiest approach is to burn a CD with all your Amiga files. But beware, the Windoze filesystem is not very good (well, we have the 4 letter word beginning with c and ending with p in mind ;-D) so it can happen that some files won't be copied correctly, at least with wrong names.

If you think WinUAE is running too slowly, here are some speedup tips. First thing you should do is disabling the sound emulation since it eats quite a lot of CPU time! If you can't live without sound emulation, reduce the sampling frequency and disable stereo mode. Next thing you can do is to set the screen refresh to every 2nd frame which should give quite some speed boost. Also, if you don't need AGA emulation, disable it as it slows down the emulation considerably. If the emulation still runs at poor speed you could either buy a faster PC (*sigh*) or just look out for a REAL AMiGA!

To avoid serious troubles or if you want to get some more hints to work in a more comfortable way with WinUAE, please read the instructions coming with the programm itself. And of course have a look at www.winuae.net for future updates and more specific information. Also www.blizzard.u-net.com/uae_faq.html can be helpful, especially for people who have never seen a real Amiga.