I love Amigas (I own two). Things were just so simple in their heyday. Music creation, programming and games playing was just a few clicks (and the odd disk insertion) away. The sort of situation I just haven't had with my PC. Bum. Still I've just downloaded this package and my faith in a useful Amiga emulator is back.

The program starts with a pretty comprehensive GUI which is a relief considering all the configuration command line swiches in other UAE versions. The program supports Picasso emulation for native screens and can also, thanks to DirectX, run in a window on the desktop with very little speed sacrifice. The program has had a major revamp since I last used it and the addition of AGA (yep, AGA!!!) screenmode is overdue but welcome.

Hard drives can use PC filesystem directories as Amiga hard drives but a 'Add PC devices on startup' button means that all PC drives including ZIPs and CDROMS can be added to the amiga and accessed as hard drives. I found though that amiga CDs wouldn't boot this way and still had to be mounted as in other UAEs to boot.

As with all Amiga emulators on the PC, full screen modes have a squashed look or go off the bottom of the screen. A standard Amiga screen is 320 x 256 while PCs have modes like 320 x 200 (good for NTSC Amiga games like Turrican though) or 512 x 384 (!). These don't translate too well but there are planty of display options to make the best of it. Using native PC screenmodes under Picasso and UAEGFX: drivers made a nice stable screen for Workbench and OS Legal stuff (Doom, PPaint etc) though.

The AGA emulation is a little flaky to say the least. HAM8 modes appear as normal HAM, sprites are unusually portrayed and many games simply refused to work beyond title pages. I did manage to play RoadKill AGA with corrupted sprites though so things can only improve now (lack of sprite collision detection also made things a little easier!! heh he!).

Sound emulation within this emulator was excellect. Usually, Amiga emulators slow down a lot when sound is enabled but with this one, there was very little slowdown meaning that it wasn't worth turning it off. This could have been because I was using a PCI sound card though (Sound Blaster PCI128). Dancing around to Turrican again really took me back (yes I know, sad!).

WinUAE is a very stable Amiga emulator. I found it very hard work to trash the system and Workbench in 16-bit colour took on a new lease of life. Going through my old CU Amiga CD collection was also interesting as I've never actually used them before due to lack of a true Amiga CDROM drive (I bought them for the future!). I even played Doom for the Amiga (DoomAttack I think). Although the frame rate wasn't great on mine, my dual PII owning friend said it went rather nicely thankyouverymuch.

If you own an Amiga then this is a godsend (along with Fellow which still has a better game frame update but no AGA yet). Get them both and enjoy computing again.

STOP PRESS - The latest version so far is V0.8.8 Release 3 which has MIDI support (cool, now I can use OctaMed).

9/10

Coagulus/Rob