IN-DEPTH Awooga, Amiga

Jonni Bidwell’s desk has become a retro gaming station, thanks to Dimitris Panokostas and his Amiberry emulator.

Ahuge number of readers, we reckon, will fondly look back on the Commodore Amiga 500. Sure, some may remember further back, to the C64s, Spectrum or even the BBC Micro. But the A500, especially when viewed through the roseate lens of nostalgia, was truly a marvel. Around £300 in 1992 would get you one of these state-of-theart machines, and you’d be able to enjoy great games from The Bitmap Brothers, Gremlin Interactive, Team17 and other great British software houses. Thirty years hence, and no machine (the Deli’s free coffee machine?–ED) has ever made us at LXF Towers so happy.

But that’s no matter, because while our younger colleagues discuss memes and web3 on social media platforms that make no sense to us, we can content ourselves with using our new-fangled hardware to emulate the machines of old. Amiga emulation has been popular, though not necessarily easy, since 1995 when UAE (originally the Unusable Amiga Emulator) was first brought to life. Today, UAE lives on, having made it from Linux to Windows (in the form of WinUAE) and from x86 machines to ARM, by way of UAE4ARM (the first Amiga emulator to run on the Pi).

Now, thanks to the Pi 4, and in no small part to Dimitris Panokostas’ hard work creating Amiberry (a lighter, faster UAE4ARM fork) Amiga emulation is in better shape than ever. Dimitris was good enough to spend some time talking to us about the project’s origins, its current state of play and its plans for the future.

We’re big Amiga fans here at Future Towers. We all read Amiga Format growing up, and somehow went on to write, layout and edit Linux Format today. It’s good, then, that the Amiga emulation scene (unlike the current state of specialist tech magazines) is so alive and well. The original UAE (then the Unix Amiga Emulator) was written in 1995 and has been ported and forked numerous times. Today, that name lives on in the forms of FS-UAE, WinUAE, PUAE and UAE4ARM, although UAE doesn’t really stand for anything anymore.

Dimitris had been a fan of Amiga emulation long before he started hacking on UAE4ARM in the mid-2010s, as he explains. “When the first Amiga emulators came out, we mostly laughed at it and saw how hard it was to emulate a humble A500 at decent speed, even on the fastest Intel processors of the time. It’s no wonder the UAE acronym stood for Unusable Amiga Emulator in the beginning. But of course, as the hardware got better and faster, and the software matured further, it eventually changed from unusable to usable, to not bad, to quite good, leading to pretty cool and faster than the real thing, nowadays – for example, if you use the JIT (Just In Time) and RTG (Retargetable graphics) options.”