The Hard Drives Window

One of the really useful features of UAE is it's ability to utilise your existing harddrives without the need for creating images or providing a separate drive. Simply select "Add Directory" and point to a location on the hardrive to have this mounted as a drive on the Amiga. As Default AF will have already configured itself as above. For AIAB you will have to add your existing PC HD's if you so wish.

The Ram Window

UAE can be configured to use a multitude of Ram configurations and also allows you to allocate up to 32mb of RTG memory so as you can see creating a very beefed up miggy is well credible. Once again AF and AIAB will have preconfigured this however I have found the configuration shown above to run the majority of titles without any fuss while allowing for an extremely fast and stable Workbench. Just remember to save any changes you may make as a new configuration so not to overwrite any working configs.

The Rom Window

To be honest you shouldn't have to modify any of the settings here as they will be preset by both AF and AIAB, however if you are intending to use ShapeShifter for Mac emulation tick the ShapeShifter support box. A more in depth description of this window is available within the WinUAE and AF documentation.

The CPU Window

This is probably the most important window in the configuration process and can easilly make or break everything. The settings shown above are what I use for my default configuration on an XP2000 system. I would seriously advise you to avoid 68040 emulation unless you really require it. I have found through time that using 68020+FPU is far more stable and easily performs just as well as the 68040. The CPU Emulation Speed as a rule should be set to Fastest Possible for general Workbench use and any games whice eat CPU (Genetic Species or most FPS titles) while Adjustable is good for a lot of older games which fall over at the first sign of a non vanilla setup. Jit Settings are where the real performance can be gained. A 4mb Cache I have found to perform the best on my system, others have found 2 or 8 to provide good performance. However a Cache size of 2mb I would advise as a bare minimum. The other settings I will not cover other than to say, copy them. This is intended as a quick guide to tweaking and nothing more. If you do want to experiment I would heartily recommend it as this is how I got my configuration.

Once you have made your changes go to the configurations tab and select "Save As". Ensure you give your config a good description. Once saved you may simply double click the new entry to start the Emulation.