If you have just installed FS-UAE, you might want to take a look at the getting started-guide first! Afterwards, you can come back for more information on how to get the most out of FS-UAE.

Some common issues and questions are answered here: FAQ and Troubleshooting.

While running the emulator, you press F12 to enter and exit the FS-UAE menu.

From here, you can load and save states, swap floppy disks and change input options. On Mac OS X, you can use Cmd+F12 instead if the F12 triggers the OS X Dashboard (or possibly even Fn+Cmd+F12 if the F-keys are used for special keys).

With gamepads, you enter the menu either by using the dedicated “menu” button, if the gamepad has one, or you press and hold “start” and “select” at the same time (or equivalent buttons).

You use the same key/button to dismiss the menu.

In the menu, you use the following keys for navigation:

• Cursor keys
• Enter (choose item, enter sub-menu)
• Back-space (leave sub-menu)

With gamepads, you can use either the hat or the primary analog stick for navigation. You choose items and enter sub-menus with the “primary” button on the game pad. This is generally the “south” button on the right side of the controller. The back button is the “east” button (similar to the standard navigation on Xbox 360)

Most FS-UAE settings are controlled via configuration files. The available options are listed in the configuration options page, and the following pages (see documentation sidebar).

Default Configuration File

The config file (My) Documents/FS-UAE/Configurations/Default.fs-uae will be automatically loaded unless the program is started with another configuration file (for instance by “opening” a configuration file in FS-UAE).

On Windows, make sure it isn’t really called Default.fs-uae.txt. It is easy to be fooled since Windows Explorer hides the file extension by default.

Host Options File

The file Host.fs-uae is always read in addition to Default.fs-uae (or the specific configuration file used when launching FS-UAE). Common settings such as fullscreen and scanlines can be set here. Options in Host.fs-uae will be applied first, so you can override the defaults set here in the primary configuration file.

Custom Configuration File

To load a custom configuration instead of the default, just give the path to the configuration file as a program argument, Example for Windows:

fs-uae.exe D:/example/CustomConfig.fs-uae

For other platforms, something like:

fs-uae ~/example/CustomConfig.fs-uae

Standard Keyboard Mapping

Not all Amiga keys are present on modern computer keyboards, and vice versa. Most keys are mapped like you would expect (F1 on your keyboard activates F1 on the emulated Amiga keyboard, etc). International keys are positionally mapped as best as possible, which hopefully means that you can set your keyboard layout in Amiga Workbench and the keyboard behaves like it is supposed to.

Here are some notable exceptions:

• Amiga Help = End (Mac laptops: Fn + Right)
• Amiga Delete = Delete (Mac laptops: Fn + Backspace)
• Amiga Numpad Left Paren = Home (Mac laptops: Fn + Left)
• Amiga Numpad Right Paren = Page Up (Mac laptops: Fn + Up)
• Amiga Left A = Page Down or Right Menu / Right Windows key.
• Amiga Right A = Left Menu / Left Windows key.
• Amiga Ctrl = Left Ctrl
• Amiga key to the left of Backspace = Insert

Keyboard Joystick Emulation

When you emulate an Amiga joystick with your keyboard, the following keys are used to control the joystick:

• Cursor keys controls the joystick stick.
• Right ctrl or right alt controls “fire” (the button).

When the keys are used to emulate the joystick, they will not activate the corresponding Amiga keys while you use this feature. So to use all Amiga features at the same time, a connected real joystick or gamepad is recommended, though it is usually not a problem. Most joystick-controlled games do not require the keyboard cursor keys to be used also…

Keyboard CD32 Gamepad Emulation

When playing CD32 games with the keyboard emulating a gamepad, additional keys are used to control the addition buttons on the gamepad:

• Cursor keys controls the directional pad.
• C = red
• X = blue
• D= green
• S = yellow
• Return = play
• Z = rewind
• A = forward
• Right ctrl or right alt also controls the red button.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• F12 (or Cmd+F12) -Enter/exit GUI.
• Shift+F12 – Release input grab.
• Alt+Tab (or Cmd+Tab) – Switch to another window / release input grab.
• Alt+F4 – Quit the emulator.
• Alt+Enter (or Cmd+Enter) – Toggle fullscreen mode.
• F11 (or Cmd+F11) – Cycle through zoom settings. It has no effect while in RTG graphics mode (“Picasso 96″).
• Shift+F11 – Zoom out a bit (pad the viewport on all sides).
• Print Scrn – Save a screenshot of the current Amiga frame to the desktop.
• Tab (in net play mode) – activate chat function.

Additionally, middle mouse button click (while not a keyboard shortcut) will also release input grab.

Joystick / Gamepad Control

• Information about supported controllers.
• Creating custom controller configurations (support new controllers)

Custom Input Mapping

In addition to easily connect a host device with an Amiga joystick port using the menu or configuration file, you can also map individual keys and buttons to Amiga actions in your configuration files.

In order to get perfect scrolling in (PAL) Amiga games, your display must have a refresh rate of 50hz and you must have full video sync enabled in FS-UAE. Full video sync will automatically be enabled if FS-UAE detects that your display runs at 50Hz. In case it doesn’t detect it, you can force full video sync with the video_sync option. If you force this, and the display isn’t running at 50Hz, the emulation will instead run at incorrect speed and you will get issues with sound.

Enabling 50Hz Modes

Depending on your system and display, this can be either easy or difficult to get 50Hz modes working. If you have have a 1920×1080 monitor which announces it’s support for 50hz properly, it can be as easy as just switching the refresh rate with the control panel on your system.

In other cases you may be able to create a custom 50Hz mode for your monitor. For Linux, you can tweak modelines in Xorg.conf, and for Mac OS X, you can use a tool such as SwitchResX.

50Hz Modes in Linux with nVIDIA

With LCDs and nVIDIA drivers, getting a working 50Hz mode can be a bit difficult in some cases, so I have written a how-to on 50Hz display modes on linux with nVIDIA drivers.

Ubuntu With 3D Acceleration

Video synchronization @50Hz does not seem to work properly in Window mode with Compiz/Unity and compositing / 3D acceleration enabled. Run FS-UAE in fullscreen to get smooth scrolling with 50Hz modes.

You may also need to do the following: Install CompizConfig Settings Manager, open it, click on General/Composite, and make sure Unredirect Fullscreen Windows is ticked.

Display Synchronization Options

You may get more stable video synchronization by trying out the different values for the video_sync_method option.

More Options

See Video Options for more options.

Configuring Audio Output Device on Linux

FS-UAE uses OpenAL for audio output. OpenAL can support several audio backends depending on your system. By creating ~/.alsoftrc, you can configure which audio backend and device OpenAL uses for audio ouput, along with several other options. See alsoftrc.sample for documentation.

More Options

See Audio Options for more options

Support for UAEGFX / Picasso 96

Version 1.2 has experimental support for uaegfx.card. It is currently enabled by specifying this option (the value is the number of MB graphics memory allocated to the emulated graphics card):

uae_gfxcard_size = 16

Action Replay

To use action replace with FS-UAE, you need an action replay rom file and you need to configure a key or button to activate the cartridge. Example:

uae_cart_file = path to rom file  keyboard_key_pageup = action_activate_cartridge

(action_activate_cartridge requires FS-UAE 1.3.17+

Environment Variables

Some environment variables can be set to aid with debugging problems:

export FS_DEBUG_INPUT=1

This will cause FS-UAE to log more information about input events to the log file.

export FS_DEBUG_FILESYS=1

This will cause FS-UAE to log all file system operations (for mounted directories) to the log file.

export FS_DEBUG_EVENTS=1

export FS_DEBUG_FLUSH=1

Compile Debug Version

If you experience a crash, it is helpful to have a stack trace for when the crash occurs. To compile a version suitable for debugging crashes, you should use the optimize=0 option when running make (also for libfsemu):

cd fs-uae-(version)  make -C libfsemu clean  make clean  make -C libfsemu optimize=0  make optimize = 0

You can run FS-UAE from the source dir without installing it, just stay in the top of the project directory and run (using Linux as an example):

out/fs-uae <optional args>

You can run FS-UAE through gdb like this:

gdb --args out/fs-uae <optional args>

If the program crashes through gdb when input is grabbed, it can be a bit akward, so the following is recommended:

gdb --args out/fs-uae --no-input-grab <optional args