WinUAE 2.0.2 Beta 8 & 9

Beta 8 & 9:

Originally Posted by :
Beta 8:

* do not use D3D9Ex if no v3 shader or dynamic texture support (workaround for some older cards that may not be fully compatible)
* added workaround for weird display drivers that don´t allow changing to 50Hz Direct3D fullscreen but accept it if identical directdraw fullscreen mode is already open
* 68000 exception3 quick fix (Zoom)
* CE 68000 CIA cycle timing updates (was too fast)
* warp mode was slow in windowed D3D mode (b7)
* selected dostype in create hardfile panel was ignored if hardfile type was dynamic
* added filter panel overlay/mask selection, put overlay/mask files in pluginsoverlays
* DMS files with fake complete first cyl (containing BBS ads) didn´t unpack correctly. Support HD DMS files (not tested)
* CE interrupt handling rewritten (still not good enough)

Beta 9:

* CE 68000 interrupt handling update, Spectre Party Demo / Phenomena works without jumping
* autoscale left and right border position restricted to sane max overscan values
* enabling autoscale changed filter mode to scale2x
* autoscale detects COLOR00 (background color) changes outside of bitplane area
* do not enumerate drives if every "Include .. drives" is not ticked
* CD32/CDTV crash fix (IOCTL CD crash) (b8?)

So is it just one guy who does all of this? Or is there a team of them?

I believe it is just Toni Wilen who does most of the work on WinUAE.

Where did he learn all his stuff?? Did he design the original chips or something?

He didn't have any involvement with the development of the Amiga. He started out as an Amiga programmer, writing software you might know such as SysInfo and FileMaster.

However, he isn't the only one involved with the complete history and development of WinUAE.

WinUAE began live as a direct port of the original UAE Amiga emulator, which was coded by Bernd Schmidt and a few others.

The first original versions of WinUAE were worked on by Brian King. At the early stages WinUAE and UAE were nearly identical, except for the WinUAE GUI. UAE was being developed by Bernd Schmidt and others, and Brian King was updating WinUAE as new versions of UAE were released.

Toni Wilen then joined Brian King to work on WinUAE. Then Brian decided to step down from developing WinUAE and left Toni to carry on the project. The original UAE development later started to slow down with hardly any updates being released, so Toni decided to instead work on WinUAE separately from UAE and so it branched off and continued on its own.

Since then Toni Wilen has been the only main developer of WinUAE, and its development has progressed much further ad faster than any other Amiga emulator, leaving UAE far behind.

A few others have helped along the way, such as Bernd Meyer, who coded the JIT for WinUAE, but on the whole WinUAE is solely developed by Toni for the last few years.

This has been great for Amiga emulation on the PC, but not so good for other platforms emulating the Amiga. They all still use UAE to base their Amiga emulation on, and this has been left far behind that of WinUAE, not really worked on the developed much for years. In this regard it was a real shame that the development of UAE slowed down and WinUAE had to break away and go it alone. If they had remained connected we would now see much more advanced Amiga emulation on other platforms too.

Also now that WinUAE has progressed so far and become so advanced, all coded by one person, it would be near impossible to pass the project on to anyone else, so if Toni ever decides to abandon the project that would probably be it.

A great interview with Toni Wilen about WinUAE, worth reading, can be found at http://obligement.free.fr/articles_t...wwillen_en.php

Hang on...Toni Wilen? Didn't he write the Amiga floppy reader software/driver for DOS/Windows?

Disk2FDI? That was written by someone else AFAIK.