Amiga Emulation Guide

[Page 4] WinUAE Settings Part 2



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Display


The original Amiga 500 had four possible main resolutions: 320x200, 640x200 (NTSC) and 320x256, 640x256 (PAL). It was also possible to double the horizontal resolution with interlace mode (e.g. 640x512) - with a great deal of flickering involved as I recall. WinUAE outputs these same resolutions as required by the game or program. Note that most games came in PAL format, so 320x256 and 640x256 were the most common resolutions.


You can select the resolution your graphics card uses to display WinUAE's output in this section, but it does not affect the resolution of the game. That is, if you increase the resolution in the Fullscreen resolution box for example, it doesn't make the game run at a higher resolution and hence look less pixellated; it just changes how big or small WinUAE's Amiga screen output looks on your screen. E.g. choosing a fullscreen resolution of 1280x1024 will result in a small 640x256 image surrounded by black borders being displayed.


Before choosing a resolution however, first click the 'Detect Pixel Format' button at the bottom of this screen, so that WinUAE can determine your graphics card's 16-bit pixel potential for optimal display. Once the test is done successfully, you can select your preferred resolution when WinUAE runs in Fullscreen mode (which is recommended).


I personally recommend either 640x480 or 800x600 as these look the best and make the best use of the screen, filling it completely. However some games may exceed this resolution, so increase it if you notice any clipping (i.e. bottom of screen is cut off). You can choose between 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color, however since the Amiga 500 only had 4096 possible colors, 16-bit color mode works the best in WinUAE.


Note, if you run an LCD monitor and hence want to use your monitor's native resolution (e.g. 1280x1024) for a crisper image, select that resolution in the Fullscreen box, then use the Filter settings of WinUAE (See the Filter section further below) to resize the display image to fit the screen properly.


For Windowed mode leave at default settings, or enter a new width in the first box, and a new height in the second box (multiples of 320 width and 256 height are the recommended values).


VSync mode is Vertical Synchronization, the synchronizing of your monitor's refresh rate with the frames per second displayed on the screen. Ticking the VSync box can result in smoother graphics in fullscreen mode however it can cause performance problems. Furthermore if you're using a refresh rate higher than 60Hz in Windows this can also cause problems. On balance I recommend unticking this box unless you notice jerky graphics and scrolling text in games.


Under Centering, I recommend ticking both Horizontal and Vertical – these help to center the Amiga emulation image on your screen when running in Fullscreen mode, and hence reduce the chance that the image may be off-center. Again, you can also use the Filter settings (See further below) to resize and reposition the image further.


I recommend ticking the 'Full Screen' box so that WinUAE runs in fullscreen mode each time you emulate the Amiga. This makes the experience much more realistic, as the Amiga emulation takes up your whole screen and no elements of Windows can be seen.


I also strongly recommend ticking the 'Correct Aspect Ratio' box, since any resolutions other than even multiples of the standard Amiga resolutions (see above) will see the image appear squashed and not showing the correct width-to-height ratio.


Leave the 'Force low resolution' and 'Filtered low resolution' boxes unticked, as they're not necessary for most games and applications. Only tick them if you need extra performance in WinUAE.


Line Mode is important, as it allows the standard Amiga Resolutions to display correctly on a PC screen. The option should be set to Double, as the other settings may see the display show lots of black horizontal lines.


Make sure the Refresh slider is to the far left, so that 'Every Frame' is shown. This increases CPU load slightly, but makes games much smoother by rendering every frame of the game's image, which the original Amiga also did.


The 'FPS Adj' slider allows you to choose an actual Frames Per Second value for the graphics output. The Amiga 500 only had two possible FPS rates – 50Hz (50 FPS) for PAL monitors (outside North America) and 60Hz (60 FPS) for NTSC monitors (US). This should be set to 50 or 60 depending on your choice of PAL or NTSC in the box next to the Fullscreen resolution box. I recommend choosing the Default option in that box, and leaving this setting at its current value as well. Only change the PAL/NTSC setting if a particular game skips frames every once in a while in an odd way.


Remember, if you experience odd graphical anomalies in games, come back and test and refine these options. The settings above work for me in all Amiga games I've used, but it depends on your monitor and particular game as to what may work better for you. And of course use the Filter settings in WinUAE to further refine and resize the image, as that's the most common problem in WinUAE image output.


Sound


The Sound Device you choose should be your main sound card or onboard sound driver.


Under Sound Emulation, I recommend the 'Enabled, 100% Accurate' mode. Selecting Enabled is recommended if you experience audio problems, however try the other options below before altering this setting. Note that the 'Disabled but Emulated' option means that sound is off, but WinUAE fools the game into thinking sound is enabled to reduce compatibility problems – not that this setting is recommended.


The Volume slider is self-explanatory, but the Sound Buffer slider is very important. It determines the amount of sound to be buffered (loaded in advance) before being played back. The larger the sound buffer – that is the further to the right the slider – the less chance there is for sound glitches, but the more "sound lag" you may experience in sound playback. I personally have a buffer of 1 which only gives a 50 millisecond delay, which is unnoticeable. You may want to try a buffer of 3 or 4 to start with, and gradually reduce it until you experience problems. A buffer of 2 should be fine for most systems.


For the Sound Settings options, I won't go into too much detail as there are many options and many possible values. The original Amiga 500 had 4 Channel 8-bit Stereo sound, and that's all that's required to emulate it accurately. However modern sound systems can sound quite poor with that sort of playback quality, so we can increase the playback quality here.


Frequency determines the quality of the sound output, and for the most part 22,050 or 44,100 are good choices for playback. Stereo Mode should be set to Stereo. Stereo Separation of 70% is normal, and Interpolation should be Disabled.


Both 'Swap Channels' and 'Stereo Mixing Delay' are left empty. The 'Audio Filter' can filter down the harshness of the Amiga's sound, and I recommend 'Emulated (A500)', as 'Always Off' can sound harsh (but accurate), and 'Always On (A500)' sounds very muted and artificial.


Now here's the cool part of these settings: Floppy Drive Sound Emulation. This option allows you to emulate the sound effects of the Amiga's 3.5" floppy drive as it loaded up information, and boy is this a real nostalgic kicker. I recommend enabling it by selecting the 'A500 (WinUAE built-in)' option from the drop box at the bottom which normally says 'No Sound'. Then use the slider just above it to reduce the volume of the drive sounds, since at 100% it's way too loud. I personally have it set to around 15% to emulate the background noise the drive use to make. The drive noises are emulated almost perfectly, pausing and whirring randomly just the way the clunky DF0: on my Amiga 500 used to do.


Enabling the drive sound emulation is also very useful, because it allows you to tell whether a game is still loading, or whether something's gone wrong. This is especially handy since sometimes games can take quite a while to load because of the 100% emulation - yes, games could sometimes take almost a minute or more to load up in the old days. It can appear like the emulation has frozen, when in fact it's just taking a while to load.


Game & I/O Ports


The important part of this section is the Mouse/Joystick ports area at the bottom - you can leave the other areas unchanged unless you want to Print from the Amiga for example.


For Port 0, which was the mouse port on the Amiga 500, I recommend selecting the default, which is 'mouse*' - this emulates the Amiga mouse using your PC mouse.


For Port 1, which was the second mouse/joystick port on the Amiga 500, for most PC users simply select a keyboard layout which suits you. I personally prefer 'Keyboard Layout B', which uses the PC arrow keys as the joystick directions, and the right CTRL and ALT keys as the primary and secondary fire buttons.


Input


If you connect a joystick to your system, WinUAE should detect it and allow you to configure it here.


Output


Here you can configure the output quality for movies of in-game gameplay which are produced in .AVI format in the directory of your choice. Select the Codecs to use for Audio and Video output by clicking the relevant buttons. Select the PAL or NTSC button as appropriate to determine the framerate for the AVI movie.


To start recording an AVI movie, you will have to click the 'AVIOutput Enabled' button either before launching Amiga emulation, or during it. To launch it during Amiga emulation, press F12 to bring up the WinUAE screen, go to the Output section and click the button. The AVI file will be placed in the directory you chose at the top of this screen – by default it's the base \WinUAE directory. You can then play back this AVI movie with a player like Windows Media Player. If you find the file size or sound quality to be problematic, play around with various codecs and encoding rates.


If you want to save static screenshots from an Amiga emulation screen, press F12 during emulation, and in the Output section of WinUAE click the 'Save Screenshot' button. This places a .BMP screenshot of the current screen in your \WinUAE\Screenshots\ directory by default.


If you want to only save the sound and music from a game and not the video, you can use the Sampleripper button. Click this button during emulation and the resulting sound output will also be saved in the \WinUAE\Screenshots\ directory by default.


Note that when AVI output recording or the Sampleripper are enabled, you may experience jerky gameplay, crackling sound etc. These depend on your system, however obviously if this is the case make sure you're not recording an AVI or audio sample while playing a game. You may need to exit and restart WinUAE to make sure.


Filter


This section allows you to apply various graphical filters to the output image of WinUAE. This usually isn't necessary, but it may be helpful if you want to move or resize the Amiga display. For example, if you run an LCD monitor and want to use your monitor's native resolution, the use of Filters allows you to run WinUAE at your monitor's native resolution, and resize the output to result in a crisper image on screen. For the most part you will have to experiment to find the right filter settings.


As an example, start up Amiga mode, load up a game and press F12 to bring up WinUAE. Now tick the Enable box and select Direct3D as the Filter type, select 'Point (16-bit)' for the sharpest image and click the OK button on the Filters screen to make sure the filter becomes active. You can now use the Horizontal and/or Vertical Size sliders to actively make the image stretch as you wish. You can also use the Horizontal/Vertical Position sliders to move the image position around on the screen. Resize the image to take up the entire screen, and use a few different games/screens to make sure that no parts of the image are going to be clipped. When you're satisfied with the results, go to the Presets box, enter a name and click the Save button to save your settings.


Misc


This screen allows you to select certain advanced functions for WinUAE. There are too many to go into detail here. Below are my recommendations:


Tick the 'Untrap mouse with middle button' box. This means that in full screen or windowed mode, if you want to switch out of WinUAE and back to your windows desktop, you can either use the ALT-TAB keyboard combination, or you can simply click your middle mouse button.


Tick the 'Show GUI on startup' option to make sure the WinUAE Graphical User Interface shows up each time you launch WinUAE.


Tick the 'Use CTRL-F11 to quit' option - this means that if WinUAE hangs for example, or you can't get into the WinUAE screen to click the Quit button, you can press the CTRL and F11 keys together to quit out of WinUAE.


The remainder of these settings are up to you to experiment with, but none are necessary for correct Amiga 500 emulation.


Priority


These settings control the priority your CPU gives to WinUAE when it is running, inactive, and minimized. For the most part changing these will not improve performance, and the default settings are fine.


You should not be running other programs when using WinUAE, especially on older systems, as this can cause problems with smooth Amiga emulation. Your first course of action is to disable all background programs and generally optimize your system as detailed in my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion.


Once you've changed your settings, make sure to save them all by using the instructions under the Configurations section on the previous page.


That brings the WinUAE Settings section to an end. I urge you to have some patience and spend some time refining these settings, as once you have them bedded down you'll find most games and applications run without a hitch on WinUAE. Experimentation is the key, but for the most part the settings provided above should work for most people to accurately emulate the Amiga 500.



The next section provides details of running games on WinUAE.