Bernd Schmidt conceived of an emulator that can run Amiga software when he found that such a task was widely believed to be impossible.

Schmidt had written previous programs for Amiga, and was further motivated by the desire to not lose games, demos, and sound modules to switching operating systems.

[1] UAE was released in 1995 and was originally called the Unusable Amiga Emulator, due to its inability to boot.

UAE has been ported to many host operating systems, including Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, DOS, Microsoft Windows, RISC OS, BeOS, Palm OS, Android, the Xbox console, the PSP, PSVita and GP2X handhelds, iOS, the Wii and Dreamcast consoles, and even to AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS.

There have been many threads in the past on Usenet and other public forums where people argued about the possibility of writing an Amiga emulator.