FS-UAE - then back to WinUAE

I've been messing around with Linux a lot lately and thought I would see where Amiga emulation is these days compared to WinUAE on Windows. Normally it's RetroArch being used on most other setups including Linux and Android emulation builds these days.

Many are still saying FS-UAE is the most accurate and best Linux based Amiga emulator. And some comments said it was very easy to setup, So I thought I would give it a good. I tested it many years ago on Windows but forgot what it was like.

To say it is illogical how to set it up is an understatement. Where you put the files is a mystery to begin with. Only once you have launched it once does it complain about a lack of a config file and once you quit you discover it's created a load of new folders in a directory outside and above where you wanted the emulators and files stored. Useful and annoying! These include roms, disks, hardfiles etc. So I copied some kickstart roms in and a few test ADFs. Rebooted it and this time it defaulted to loading to the KS1.3 insert disk screen. So I was getting somewhere. Pressing F12 to bring up the GUI was confusing because it showed drive slots but they were empty with nothing to select and no ability to navigate to select them,

Reading the docs you have to manually configure text files to tell the emulator where and what each disk image is and the configuration for the Amiga being emulated. I really couldn't be bothered with that so FS-UAE went straight into the bin!

This day and age I think we can expect a proper GUI based front end to setup and get an emulator working.

So instead I just ran WinUAE in Linux! I download WinUAE, then added it to the Heroic Games Launcher and told it to launch the installer first. It ran first time, automatically found my rom and adf folders and was ready to go when it first loaded to the properties window. That's how you make an emulator. Heroic using Wine/Proton to run the Windows software.

And I can report that running WinUAE in Linux Mint works perfect well. The games I tested all loaded and ran fine. I did have a few minutes of fighting the emulator to correctly use the mouse and an Xbox 360 controller I had connected. Eventually I sorted that out then it ran no problem. I'm still really bad at R-Type and Swiv, but they both ran fine.