Emulator mac amiga software#
Emulator mac amiga license#

Rather than reimplementing the BIOS from the ground up or requiring the end user to supply his or her copy of the BIOS, though, Amiga Forever took the unique step of approaching Amiga International (the copyright holders) to request a license deal for the Amiga BIOS. The heart of the bundle is WinUAE, a Windows Amiga emulator that requires a copy of the Amiga BIOS to run.

Emulator mac amiga software#

Not so much a single emulator as an emulator software bundle, Amiga Forever promotes an intriguing approach to the legal issues surrounding emulation.

If such a program can be provided to the end user of an emulator, and if that user happens to own a computer of the platform being emulated, he or she can easily use the BIOS-saving program to legally obtain a copy of the BIOS and can then have the emulator run on that copy. It is fairly easy to write a program that can save the contents of a computer's BIOS to a disk. Reimplementation aside, the other option is to have the end user procure his or her own copy of the BIOS. Reimplementing the BIOS may seem senseless at first, much like reinventing the wheel, but is often a necessary procedure when the copyright holders of the original BIOS refuse to license the BIOS to the emulator's developers so that they can use that version in the emulator - as is often the case. The first is to reimplement the BIOS from the ground up: to rewrite the BIOS, in other words, despite the fact that a perfectly good BIOS (i.e., the one was implemented in the original system) already exists. The developers of emulators for these systems have two options when it comes to simulating the BIOS. As mentioned in a previous section, emulators for some systems - like the Amiga and Macintosh - must be able to simulate that system's BIOS to function properly. What exactly are the emulators that all this debate is about? This section examines a few specific examples of modern software emulators and takes a look at their respective legal statuses.ДЄ sidenote that may be helpful in reading this: there are two main types of emulators, those that use a copied BIOS and those that use a reimplemented BIOS.