The popular Amiga emulator WinUAE has hit version 6.0.0, and this update is anything but minor. The custom chipset emulation has been almost completely rewritten, with major changes that improve accuracy and open the door to new possibilities. But fair warning: with so much changed under the hood, you might run into the occasional bug, especially in less commonly used features.
At the core of the update is a fresh take on Agnus/Alice and Denise/Lisa chip behavior. Almost every part of the chipset now runs with cycle accuracy that comes surprisingly close to hardware-level behavior. Things like display sync, blanking intervals, and even obscure genlock tricks now behave much more like they would on a real Amiga.
Nerds might not need antivirus. But for your family’s PC, Bitdefender is a solid choice .
One change that stands out is that Denise/Lisa emulation has been moved to a separate thread. That means a noticeable performance boost when running in accurate modes, especially on modern CPUs. This could be a big win for people who want accuracy without giving up speed.
Some classic hacks and register tricks, like VPOSW/VHPOSW timing games or custom NTSC tweaks, now work more reliably. Fake screenmodes are supported more cleanly, and even long-forgotten features like UHRES DMA are handled correctly (despite that particular one never doing much beyond stealing a few cycles).
Blitter timing has been tightened up, especially when mid-operation values are changed. Collision detection is now faster and more accurate, and a new ultra-detailed debug mode exposes previously hidden bitplane and sprite activity during blanking periods. Developers and demo authors will probably appreciate how deep the visibility now goes.
Outside of the chipset, there are more welcome additions. Keyboard emulation has gone low-level with full microcontroller behavior, and even obscure things like flashing the Caps Lock LED now work. Matrox and Voodoo PCI GPUs from 86box are now included, and new hardware like the RIPPLE IDE controller and A1000 512k WOM module have been added.
Plenty of bugs have been addressed. RTG vertical blank issues were cleaned up, graphics API fallbacks now make more sense, printer passthrough behaves better on modern drivers, and FDI image support is fixed. Even long-standing quirks like sound card switching crashes or missing vertical interrupts are now resolved.
The default configuration now starts with a cycle-exact A500 setup. If you’re using unusual resolutions or scanline tricks, you’ll find the new status line now shows helpful info like line count and type. Tree view settings in the config window are also saved and restored, and scaling behavior works more logically with complex modes like superhires and doublescan.
CD32 users get some love too. The emulator now reads optical discs in a more consistent way, and the flickering CD audio icon has been eliminated. WASAPI sound fallback is more graceful, and latency over TCP serial ports is reduced with a new option. Clipboard sharing is also smarter now, limiting initial Windows-to-Amiga pastes to avoid slowdown on startup.
One niche but useful change: hard drives with GPT or MBR partitions are now listed properly even if access is blocked, and the hard drive dialog shows “ACCESS DENIED” rather than hiding the drive entirely. Small thing, but helpful when troubleshooting.
Software filters and 16-bit host color modes are now gone, simplifying the codebase and clearing the way for future improvements. The emulator now always runs in subpixel-accurate mode when accuracy is enabled. The uaegfx RTG driver also gets a config-only option to disable auto-created screenmodes for users who want a setup closer to real hardware.
There are dozens of other little improvements and bug fixes packed into this release. If you’ve been using WinUAE casually, you may not notice them all right away. They are more for developers, testers, and retro fans who demand precision.
WinUAE 6.0.0 is available now here. As always, it’s free to download, but if you rely on it, consider tossing a donation to support continued development. This version isn’t just about speed or features, folks, it’s about getting closer to how the Amiga really worked.
