Replacement Simple Front End for WinUAE?

[Yanni Oblivion]

Hiya all, I'm just wondering, is there a replacement front-end available for WinUAE to make it stupidly easy to operate for even the dumbest of people?

See a member of my family wishes to use it, but they also hardly know how to switch on a light bulb, let alone work an emulator :-s

[Demon Cleaner]

You can always go to LemonAmiga and try out the Lemonade frontend. Or you can install GameBase Amiga, which you can get from torrent sites like Underground Gamer, or set it up yourself, which could be a bit fiddly because of the scripts. I guess for you the best solution is Lemonade.

[Harrison]

There are a few different frontends available for WinUAE. Here is a quick list (including those already mentioned:

• Lemonade (good, easy to use frontend for beginners, but not updated in some time) http://www.lemonamiga.com/
• GameBase (more extensive, but harder to setup. Worth it for the end result though) http://gbamiga.elowar.com/
• Amiga Forever (the commercial version of WinUAE has a frontend quick launcher to load games and other software at a single click. Very buggy when I've used it though)
• JAmiga (this is a fairly new Frontend developed by TheCyberDruid and supporting 64bit OSs too) Find it here.
• WinUAE Launcher (Quite old now, but might still work) Find it here.
  
• ConWU (Again very old, but might still work) Find it here.

There have been a few other WinUAE frontends over the past few years, but I currently forget their names. I've not heard anything from their developers recently either.

Out of these, Lemonade is the easiest to use, but it doesn't support every game and hasn't been updated in a couple of years. It does however link to the LemonAmiga database for cheats and game information within the frontend.

Gamebase is the most uptodate, but it needs specific versions of each game adf, but adf game torrents for Gamebase can be downloaded from a couple of the well known torrent sites.

JAmiga is an interesting one. You can use any game adf with it, and it doesn't work on a predefinied database of games. Instead it loads configuration files for each game you have. So you can set each game up in WinUAE to work properly, and then JAmiga will load the config file for it from its frontend.

Another alternative is to use a Multi system frontend with WinUAE. A nice one, but very hard to setup is MAMEWah. I used to use that all the time. It is originally developed for MAME cabinet use, so can completely mask the OS and be controlled via joystick.

GameEX is another recent, and very polished emulation frontend. It works like a full mediaplayer, and looks a bit like Windows Media Player. You can find it at http://www.gameex.net/

There are many other universal cross emulator front ends, but I think that should give you enough to get you going.

[Demon Cleaner]

Oh yeah, and we almost forgot about EmuControlCenter which I have running at work with Amiga emulation, very nice, new, often updated frontend. Easy to set up for Amiga. Look for it here.

[Yanni Oblivion]

Thanks for the info everyone, I shall give them a look in.

I found one by the name of "Pipiscrew" (I think), but I am a bit iffy about installing it, as it seems to be a bit dodgy (it allegedly comes with quite a few games and kickstart ROMs as part of the installer package ).

[Demon Cleaner]

Never heard of that one.

[Harrison]

I'd not heard of that one either.

I did a quick google for it and found a link with some screenshots here. Looks like whoever is behind it has just used jamiga, or a similar frontend, and Winuse, to make a disk of games and Amiga emulation. I would avoid it and just download one of the ones mentioned above as we know they are safe.

[woody.cool]

GameEX looks cool .... it looks just like Windows XP Media Center

[Harrison]

GameEX is a very nice frontend indeed. Slick and just like MCE.

[Demon Cleaner]

And it's updated every week at least. I also downloaded some extras for GameEX, so if you would need them, I can provide them, although I don't know how big the file is?