I have a few different kinds of original Amiga computers. They are mostly built up out of hardware from the olden days too. I do love them. They are shining artifacts of the past. They are museum pieces. They are rare and esoteric. They have a certain look, smell and sound. They are fascinating in all sorts of ways.
They also misbehave, require maintenance and have crazy quirks. They have highly nonstandard video outputs. They are EXPENSIVE to procure, expand and maintain.
Emulation
Emulation of the Amiga thanks to the Universal Amiga Emulator, normally known as UAE, is phenomenally good.
The usual choice for windows is WinUAE. For Linux and Apple there is FS-UAE. UAE is available for free. It is great software that runs fast enough to beat Commodore’s fasted Amiga by 50x or more on even modest modern computers. Expensive real word cards and expansions can be added to emulation just by checking a tick box.
I run FS-UAE on Lubuntu on a used $50 thin client from ebay. But any laptop or desktop or even a Raspberry Pi will do. In fact the pistorm amiga accelerators are a Raspberry Pi amiga emulator running on an amiga š
A real joystick is a good idea though, a USB Speedlink Competiton Pro (which also comes with emulated games by download for an instant experience) is less than 50USD. I think I got mine from Amazon and it is great.
To get UAE running fully some proprietary ROMs are required, which is a pain but they can be found very cheaply. Then, armed with some Workbench 3.1 floppy disk images in the .ADF format (which seem to be freely available) and a pre-configured Classic Workbench environment, a full Amiga desktop environment can be setup very quickly.
Barely recognizable to someone familiar with a basic Workbench 1.3 or 2.04 or 3.1 install but so slick to use. Of course a standard workbench installation can be performed on a virtual hard drive too. Swap those virtual floppy disks like it is the virtual 90s.
Another option is to buy fully configured Amiga emulation (which has UAE behind the scenes) sold as Amiga Forever. The plus edition is pretty feature packed and prefilled with games and demos and costs 30USD. Less than a console game. It was where I started with emulation in 2014 and it required no particular knowledge.
Amiga forever can also be the source of copyright software for installing the slick and impressive AmiKit. Amikit is a highly configured Amiga desktop environment that is ready to go. It can launch PC application inside the Amiga desktop and could be a person’s daily driver operating system.
Games
Games for the Amiga are available on .adf floppy disks. These can be inserted into the emulator and booted just like that. I insert them as read only mostly because they can have viruses on them from the old days. Mostly not though. I still sometimes do this on emulators and on real computers for the demos that often come prior to the game loading. Mostly I use WHDLoad both on real Amigas and under emulation.
With a virtual hard drive and WHDLoad software, games can be launched from the Amiga Workbench desktop. Exit back to Workbench is also possible. But who ever wants to leave the Shufflepuck Cafe?
WHDLoad game packages and ADFs are available from all sorts of places. Google is your friend and mine. They are usually copied to a virtual hard drive by adding a host system folder as an Amiga hardrive in the emulation (neat!). If you know me in person ask me if I can help if you like.
Downsides?
There are very few downsides to emulation. One is that it is hard, or impossible, to get perfectly smooth scrolling all of the time. It is not like scrolling is jittery but with so much Amiga software hard locked to 50 frames per second and so few monitors able to go below 60 there will be minor discontinuities. I suspect there are ways to overcome it but I have never bothered.
Emulation is great. There are some who say it is ‘not real’ or whatever. Meh. Fire up an emulator, load a favourite game and have fun. As your world contracts to a rectangular space established nearly 40 years ago the fact that it is due to genius emulation software should be a source of delight.
Benjamin's Bench 