Open the source code of WinUAE and the credits read like a relay race. Bernd Schmidt wrote the core of UAE from 1995 to 2001. Mathias Ortmann did the first Windows port from 1996 to 1999. Brian King wrote the interface and graphics-card support from 1996 to 2001. One line runs from 1998 to the present: “Toni Wilen - Win32 port, core code updates.” For most of the emulator’s life, WinUAE has been Wilen’s program. Its changelog, with entry after entry marked “(me)”, tracks down the Amiga’s behaviour one game or demo at a time.
Fast facts
- Country: Finland
- Project: WinUAE, credited from 1998; its lead developer since the early 2000s
- Milestones: near cycle-exact CPU and blitter emulation (before 1.0); WinUAE 1.0 on 6 June 2005; version 6.0.3 in March 2026
- Source code: published on GitHub under his name
Before WinUAE
Wilen’s name was known to Amiga users before emulation. In 2000 the Italian magazine Enigma Amiga Life, reviewing a CD of old Amiga software, singled out “FileMaster 1.0 di Toni Wilen” as an old acquaintance of early Amiga owners, a file manager that came before Directory Opus.
Taking over WinUAE
UAE began as Bernd Schmidt’s Unix program, and its Windows version came from Ortmann and King. By April 1999 Amazing Computing reported that “Brian King maintains the WinUAE package”. Wilen joined the credits in 1998, and King’s credit ends in 2001. The changelog that ships with WinUAE starts in the UAE 0.8.22 era, and from then on nearly every line is Wilen’s work. Its tone is plain and sometimes rueful: one beta lists “fix stupid blitter cycle diagram bug (stupid me)”.
His name had reached the Amiga’s own history books by 2012. Jimmy Maher, writing The Future Was Here, a study of the Amiga, thanked “Toni Wilen, longtime maintainer of the Microsoft Windows version of UAE that I use”, for the tool he used to examine Amiga software.
Timing
The Amiga was hard to emulate because its processor shared the machine with custom chips working at the same time. In 1998 Amiga Format noted that these chips “can be reprogrammed at microsecond intervals”, and that real Amiga programs relied on “exact synchronisation” which UAE could not then deliver. Wilen’s most far-reaching change addressed exactly that. In a pre-1.0 beta he added “unoptimized near cycle-exact cpu and blitter emulation”, which fixed “most programs that expect correct cpu and blitter speed”. He warned that it needed at least 50 per cent more processing power and was “very experimental, timing is quite far from perfection”.
He has refined it ever since. Changelog entries fix blitter timing that is “very undocumented”, correct the BLITPRI priority bit “(Robotics Life, probably others too..)”, and add, with Bernd Schmidt, “cycle exact bitplane modulo emulation (fixes Lemmings 3 AGA)”. The 6.1 development notes describe a rewrite of the Copper as “a relatively simple 3 stage state machine based on Alice schematics”, Alice being the AGA version of the Agnus chip. The cycle accuracy entry explains why this level of detail matters.
Copy-protected disks
An ordinary Amiga disk image stores only the data a normal drive reads back, so protected games would not run. In a beta of WinUAE 0.8.23 Wilen added support for the disk images of CAPS, the Classic Amiga Preservation Society. The library it needed was “Not yet available for public”, and he added a warning: “I don’t answer any Caps-specific questions.” Later versions read its IPF images even from zip archives, and WinUAE 2.8.0 added “support for raw dumps from Softpres Capture Tool and KryoFlux”, the flux-level captures made with the KryoFlux board. The disk protection entry explains why the timing and layout of those tracks matter.
WinUAE today
WinUAE now emulates every Amiga from the A1000 to the A4000 and CD32, the OCS, ECS and AGA chipsets, 68000 to 68060 processors, graphics cards and PowerPC accelerator boards. Its emulation code also runs inside FS-UAE. Cloanto’s Amiga Forever, which sells licensed Kickstart ROMs, has bundled Windows versions of UAE since its first edition, and by 1999 shipped “the latest version of WinUAE tested by Cloanto”. In a 2004 Total Amiga interview, Bill Panagouleas of the Amiga software company DiscreetFX said that people who just wanted to run old games or applications on a PC “have Amiga Forever thanks to the hard work of Toni Wilen, Cloanto and many others”.
Sources
- WinUAE source code,
od-win32/win32.cppcredits (web, secondary): “(c) 1998-2026 Toni Wilen - Win32 port, core code updates”, with the dates for Schmidt, King and Ortmann. https://github.com/tonioni/WinUAE - WinUAE source code,
od-win32/winuaechangelog.txt(web, secondary): “(me)” entries, “(stupid me)”, the near cycle-exact beta, later cycle-exact fixes, CAPS support in the 0.8.23 betas, KryoFlux and Softpres raw dumps in 2.8.0, the 6.1 Copper rewrite, WinUAE 1.0 on 6 June 2005. https://github.com/tonioni/WinUAE - GitHub profile “tonioni” (Toni Wilen) (web, secondary): location given as Finland. https://github.com/tonioni
- WinUAE home page (web, secondary): version 6.0.3, March 2026, and supported hardware. https://www.winuae.net/
- Enigma Amiga Life (Italy) no. 108, February 2000, review of the Amiga ClassiX CD: “FileMaster 1.0 di Toni Wilen, che anticipò Directory Opus”.
- Amazing Computing vol. 14 no. 4, April 1999, Amiga Forever review: “Brian King maintains the WinUAE package”; vol. 14 no. 9, September 1999: Amiga Forever 3.0 with “the latest version of WinUAE tested by Cloanto”.
- Amiga Format issue 108, March 1998, pp. 21–23, Simon Goodwin, UAE feature: chips “reprogrammed at microsecond intervals”, “exact synchronisation”, and Amiga Forever’s use of Windows versions of UAE.
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), acknowledgements.
- Retro Gamer issue 5, 2004, Classic Gaming Expo UK preview: the Classic Amiga Preservation Society.
- Total Amiga issue 19, Winter 2004, interview with Bill Panagouleas of DiscreetFX.