Emulation Explained

Everything you need to know about emulators.

An emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system or compatible hardware to behave like another computer system.
eg: An Amiga Emulator, such as WinUAE running on a Windows PC, allows you to use Amiga software on the PC.

An emulator typically enables the system to run software or occasionally use peripheral devices designed for the original system.

Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program in an electronic device to emulate (or otherwise called: imitate) another program or device.

Since at least the 1990s, many video game enthusiasts have used emulators to play classic (and/or forgotten) arcade games from the 1980s using the games' original 1980s machine code and data, which is interpreted by a current modern day system.

Amiga Emulation.
- UAE was released way back in 1995 and was originally called the 'Unusable Amiga Emulator', due to its inability to boot. Nowadays WinUAE is a very stable Windows based Amiga Emulator. Other Amiga emulators are available on almost every other hardware platform.

There are five main forks of the original program:

- WinUAE: Designed to run on Windows based PC's
- PUAE: Designed to run on Unix platforms (continuation of the abandoned E-UAE and also a port of WinUAE)
- FS-UAE: Made to run on Windows, macOS and Linux (a port of WinUAE with a focus on emulating games, featuring a new on-screen GUI and cross-platform online play)
- UAE4all: A stripped version, designed to run a low end Amiga emulation on mobile devices.
- Scripted Amiga Emulator (SAE): Developed to run in a modern browser using JavaScript and HTML5.

Commodore 64 Emulation.
There are a number of C64 Emulators available for virtually all platforms. The most common is VICE. VICE allows you to use Commodore 64 games and software on almost any platform including Windows PC, Raspberry Pi, Mac, Amiga, mobile devices and others.