QAE Builds a Unified Host Filesystem That Can Make Cloud Storage Appear as an Ordinary Amiga Disk

Jon Lennart Aasenden's QAE emulator implements a virtual Zorro II shared memory bus, allowing AmigaOS to interact with Dropbox, Google Drive, and cloud storage natively.

The QAE Amiga emulation project has gained one of its most technically interesting features yet: a shared communication system allowing ordinary 68k Amiga software to exchange data directly with the modern host environment. Developer Jon Lennart Aasenden has implemented the feature around a virtual Zorro II device containing 8MB of reserved memory. AmigaOS does not treat that memory as ordinary Fast RAM. Instead, it becomes a communication area shared between the emulated Amiga and the host system. Interrupts allow the host to signal the Amiga when messages are waiting, while semaphores protect the shared data from simultaneous access. The lower-level functionality has been packaged into qaeshm.library, which currently exposes dozens of functions that Amiga applications can call. On top of that foundation sits something much more visible: an Amiga device driver and DOS handler capable of presenting host storage as though it were a normal Amiga volume. Users can navigate the host drive from an Amiga shell and perform ordinary file operations without manually constructing traditional disk images. Because the developer's wider Quartex Pascal environment already uses an abstract filesystem design, the same interface can potentially point toward services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Azure or FTP. From the Amiga's perspective, those remote services simply appear as ordinary storage obeying familiar APIs. Drag-and-drop support has also been implemented through a commodity called qaedroptarget. Files or folders dropped onto the QAE display can be copied directly to the Amiga RAM disk, avoiding the usual process of creating shared directories just to transfer a handful of files. The current FreePascal-based components use a 68020 baseline, which is not particularly restrictive inside an emulator where accelerated 68040 and 68060 profiles are available. QAE is also implementing UAEGfx-compatible RTG output with modern 32-bit resolutions and large amounts of video memory. The long-term ambition stretches beyond file sharing. Once host and guest can exchange high-speed messages and graphical data reliably, the developer wants ordinary Linux applications to appear inside Amiga Workbench windows. Whether every part of that vision reaches production remains to be seen, but the filesystem work alone is significant. Emulation traditionally tries to reproduce an old machine as an isolated box. QAE is instead asking what happens when AmigaOS can participate naturally in modern storage and cloud infrastructure without needing to understand any of it itself.