Amiga 1200 Emulator

[Cecile Lilien]

TheAmiga is a series of computers released by Commodore starting in 1985. It was a very powerful and capable machine for its time, featuring a Motorola 68000 and custom chips dedicated to IO, sound, graphics and more. This family of computers became quite popular, especially in Europe, spawning a huge library of games over time. Due to its superior graphics capabilities compared to its contemporaries, it was widely used in the desktop video, video production, and show control business, leading to video editing systems such as the Video Toaster. It was even used by skate companies to edit their videos.

The later Amigas failed to advance vastly on the old models, and the family lost its gain to newer video game consoles and other PC architectures. Eventually, Commodore went bankrupt, and production of Amiga hardware and games has been on the decline since. Despite this, there are still a handful of loyal Amiga users today. Software continues to be developed for the classic machines, as well as a newer line of PowerPC-based Amigas released in the 2000s and beyond.

The Amiga was a tremendously complex machine, with multiple revisions to its hardware and system software. This can make emulation quite tricky, as figuring out the requirements for any specific game can be fairly difficult.

A commercial package exists, "Amiga Forever", from Cloanto, which elides past many of the complexities of Amiga emulation. It includes fully licensed ROMs, system disks, and (for applicable machines) hard drive OS images for every model that Commodore shipped. The package itself is effectively a very sophisticated frontend for WinUAE and WinFellow but comes with pre-configured setups for many games. If you have sufficient expertise, you can manually do everything it's doing, but it's pretty convenient even for experts. It's also the easiest way to get legal copies of the original system ROMs.

The Amiga CD32 is an Amiga 1200-based console that came with a CD-ROM drive and was first released in September 1993. It could also be upgraded to mimic an Amiga 1200 PC by equipping it with third-party add-ons like a keyboard, floppy drive, hard drive, RAM and a mouse. A hardware MPEG decompression module for playing Video CDs was also released.

PowerPC-based Amiga computers were made by a few different enterprises under the license of Commodore International after its demise. They come with a new version of AmigaOS, AmigaOS 4.x, which only runs on PowerPC-based Amiga hardware or Motorola 68K-based Amiga computers with extra PowerPC acceleration boards.

FS-UAE and WinUAE can emulate the PowerPC acceleration board, so it could also run AmigaOS 4.x if a compatible PowerPC acceleration board such as Blizzard PPC has been properly configured. Extra ROM files are required to emulate these acceleration boards.

BlackBox is an interpretive emulator. Thus the emulation speed is mediocre but provides lower input latency and better compatibility; Petunia uses dynamic recompilation to speed up emulation but consumes more memory and with less compatibility.

New on Batocera (5.26), i added my Amiga roms files in the A1200 directory.

Structure is a .uae file with a directory with all files included.

I have 6 games.

When i try to launch them, screen goes black then return to Batocera.

Hi, the uae file is not essential, I use the games in .lha format without problem, automatic start without going through the amiberry interface, my architecture: Pi3B no overclocking internal storage.

Does someone have a write up on how to run Amiga games?? I downloaded a rom set, placed the files (ADF) in the Amiga 1200 directory, bios roms in Bios dir but when I select a game I only get the insert disk screen

amiga 500 has different chips (ocs/ecs versus aga .. as far as i know of) than amiga1200 maybe i dont know really if it would work you can swap all the contents of the amiga1200 folder to the amiga500 folder. the disk format is correct ADF is supported however

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I know that UAE is a pretty good Amiga Emulator, but it seems aimed to emulatr an Amiga 500 or a 1200. While the CD32 is similar to the Amiga 1200 - 68EC020 CPU, 2 MB ChipRAM, AGA - it has a special Chip, the Akiko, which does not seem to be supported by UAE.

Also, there is Airsoft's Akiko, which was last updated in 2002. Sure, there is always a point where one is "done" writing an emulator, but I still wonder if this is any good and even compatible with newer systems? It looks also only his UAE Modifications are Open Source, while the Akiko-part is not part of that.

I don't have any Amiga CD32 programs to try it on, but WinUAE seems to have CD32 support. The documentation is a little sketchy, but the "bugs fixed" list has a whole bunch of CD32 references in it. And the most recent release was a month ago.

You will need a copy of the Kickstart ROM and Workbench disk images, version 3.0 or 3.1. This is still under copyright, and at least the Workbench images can be bought from amigaforever.com. They can also be found on several places on the Internet, as usual DuckDuckGo is your friend.

Hard disk images for Classic WB can be found at classicwb.abime.net. I used the LITE version for the Amiga 1200, but for an Amiga 600 you probably want the 68K version.

If you want to be completely sure that you have selected the correct disk, you can run detail disk just to verify. When you are 100% sure, run clean. This completely wipes the file system information from the disk, making it ready to use in the Amiga. exit diskpart.

First, format the partitions by right clicking on them and select Icons -> Format disk from the menu. Name DH0 System and DH1 whatever you want (I just named mine Stuff). Make sure to use Quick Format. Confirm all warnings.

Then, press F12 to enter the WinUAE settings and go to CD & Hard Drives. Now you need to add the System.hdf file that you extracted from the Classic WB archive you downloaded in Step 1. Click Add Hardfile and select the System.hdf file. Make sure that the HD Controller is UAE, and name the device DH2. You should set boot prio to 1 (not 0).

It should now boot into the Classic WB installer. Follow the instructions (there are many, many options, and I have no good advice to give about them), and when prompted to insert a Workbench disk, press F12 to enter settings and do that. This is your change to choose between Workbench 3.0 and 3.1.

After the installation is done, and you have restarted, you probably will not see you compact flash partitions. This is because the Amiga gets confused by the two System partions. Rename the Classic WB partition to System2 (or something other than just System) and restart the virtual machine. You should now see all partitions.

After the copying is done, press F12 again to go into settings, and remove the System.hbf image from the hard disks. You should now only have your Compact Flash card left. Reset the virtual machine, and you should hopefully boot back into Classic Workbench.

Congratulations, you now have a working Compact Flash card for use in your Amiga. At this point, you could install it in the Amiga, start it, and everything should work. However, the point of Amiga is playing games, so we have one step left!

The Games and Demos need to be unpack into individual folders grouped by initial. For example Games/A/AnotherWorld_v2.4_0425. For games beginning with a number, the folder should be called 0_9. This can be done on the PC, or you can unpack them using DOPUS (as long as you have grouped them by initial).

Now, use DOPUS again to copy the files from PC to DH1. If you did not unpack the archives earlier you can use Arc Ext to extract all the archives, buy you will have to do it folder by folder. I copied them to DH1:Gamesand DH1:Demos, but you can organise your files however you want.

Now that my new Amiga 1200 has been restored, and the boot loop repaired, I have been having a play with the PiStorm32-Lite. Things have come along leaps and bounds since this Amiga 1200 board was released, so I wanted to go over setting it up and running it.

As far as the software goes, the Emu68 emulator is a first-class citizen. This is a bare-metal (no Linux OS on the Pi) JIT-based emulator that is incredibly fast. Instead of a CPLD used in the original PiStorm, an FPGA is used in the PiStorm32-Lite. This is flashed by the Pi automatically on power-up, which makes firmware upgrades much easier.

Now, on the FAT32 partition, you need to extract the zip you downloaded from GitHub. Note that this should be on the root of the FAT32 partition, not a subdirectory. Next, I recommend taking your favourite Kickstart ROM file, renaming it kick.rom and copying it here. The PiStorm will pick it up and use it on boot.

To setup the SD card partition, install the OS and RTG on the Amiga side I recommend reading this page on Retro32. Everything I would say here would be pretty much the same. It is worth noting that on the Raspberry Pi 4 it is brcm-emmc.device instead of brcm-sdhc.device. This is because the SD card hardware in a Pi 4 has a different controller to other models.

This will be read-only by default. So if you want it to be writable, which allows you to update Emu68 from the Amiga, you need pop the SD card in the PC, add a file called cmdline.txt and put in there:

A lot has been said in the past about game compatibility. But, nowadays, a majority of Amiga demos and games work file in the PiStorm32-Lite, and the list is getting better all the time. Some need settings changed in EmuControl for certain demos and games, but there is a compatibility table available here which shows what needs changing. Most of the remaining issues are to do with self-modifying code, which a JIT based emulator such as Emu68 will struggle to execute correctly.

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