How to run my old programs using Amiga Forever

Cloanto sells an Amiga emulator called Amiga Forever. If you just want to see A Season in RAM or Picture Garden on a Windows machine, the $9.95 Value Edition is all you need. It recreates the experience of using an early Workbench 1.3 Amiga with slow, grunting floppy drives.

Steve Headroom requires the $29.95 Plus Edition, which is like a fast, modern Workbench 3.x Amiga with a hard drive. It can also emulate earlier versions of Workbench.

To run A Season in RAM or Picture Garden on a PC at lowest cost:

  1. Buy and install Amiga Forever Value Edition.
  2. Download SeasonPlus.adf (880k) This floppy disk image also includes three lesser efforts, Frog Dream, Wish List, and Snapshots from the Monkey Picnic. Save it where you'll be able to find it in Step 7.
  3. Start Amiga Forever.
  4. Click on the Applications tab.
  5. Select Workbench 1.3, then click on the big round Play button.
  6. When the RAM DISK and Workbench1.3 icons appear, click on the little blue floppy disk on the lower left of the emulator window. Select "Insert."
  7. Locate the "SeasonPlus.adf" file on your hard drive, and click "Open."
  8. The SeasonPlus icon will appear. Open it with a double-click, just like you'd expect. The Amiga interface is similar to Windows, except the Close Window button is on the upper LEFT, not the upper right, and you use the right mouse button to access menus.

To run Steve Headroom on a PC:

  1. Buy and install Amiga Forever Plus Edition.
  2. Start Amiga Forever.
  3. Click on the Tools menu, then Open Amiga Files. Open Shared, then dir, then Work. Open the window wide enough to see the whole path in the title bar, so you can refer to it in the next step. On my Win XP computer it's "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Amiga Files\Shared\dir\Work".
  4. Download SteveHeadroom.lha (1.1 MB), saving it to the Work directory you just opened.
  5. Back in Amiga Forever, click on the Applications tab.
  6. Select Workbench 3.x, then click on the big round Play button.
  7. When Workbench has loaded, double-click on Work to open it.
  8. With the Work window active, hold down the right mouse button, go to the Window menu, go to Show, highlight All Files, and release the right mouse button.
  9. In the Work window, find the SteveHeadroom.lha icon.
  10. Find the LHA->RAM icon on the bottom of the Workbench screen. It looks like a red vise. Drag SteveHeadroom.lha onto the LHA->RAM icon.
  11. Press Return/Enter to close the LhA->RAM window.
  12. Double-click on the Ram Disk icon, then on LhA.
  13. Drag the SteveHR drawer into Work so you won't have to go through all these steps next time.
  14. Delete the LhA drawer on the Ram Disk this way: Click on it to highlight it. Hold down the right mouse button, go to the Icons menu and highlight Delete, then release the right mouse button. Click Delete.
  15. You can also delete SteveHeadroom.lha from Work if you want.
  16. To run Steve Headroom, the white Amiga Workbench bar needs to be showing at least 1,700,000 graphics mem. If it isn't, try closing some windows or increasing the Chip RAM. (To increase Chip RAM, press the F12 key on your keyboard, open the Settings/Hardware/RAM window, and move the Chip: slider to the right. Click OK.)
  17. Open the SteveHR directory in Work. If you look at the ReadMe file, use the Space Bar to advance through the pages and exit.
  18. Double-click the SteveHeadroom icon, and bask in his wisdom. It sometimes takes a few mouse clicks to make him go away.

Notes:

You can load SeasonPlus.adf in Workbench 3.x by following Steps 2-8 in the instructions for Value Edition near the top of this page, then dragging the directories over to Work. You can also download Season and Picture Garden individually as LhA files:
SeasonInRAM.lha (97k),
PictureGarden.lha (79k),
If you'll mainly be running Picture Garden in WB 3.x, download the LhA, because its icons look better in that version of Workbench.

The LhA of Season uses the WB 1.3 icons because the program sounds awful in Workbench 3.x. Seriously, only play A Season in RAM in Workbench 1.3. For some reason they changed the system's speech functions in WB 3.x, and it makes the line readings sound like someone doing a bad impression of William Shatner.

If you try to watch Steve Headroom or any of the collage generators in full screen mode on a widescreen monitor, the image gets stretched unacceptably wide. I haven't found a 100% satisfactory solution, but I've had some luck in WB3.x pressing the F12 key on the keyboard, then opening the Settings/Host/Filter screen, and, under Presets, loading D3D Autoscale.

When you quit a program, if the Workbench 3.x colors get screwed up, close all the windows and open Work, and they should reset.

Finally, after installing Amiga Forever Plus Edition from the CD you made, REMOVE THE CD. If you leave it in, the next time you start your computer it will boot as an Amiga over a light version of Linux. On my machine, it wouldn't even let me remove the CD. To get out of this situation, click on the UAE Control icon on the lower right, then the Quit UAE button. It will then let you remove the CD. It implies that hitting Return will reboot, but I had to turn it off using my computer's On/Off button (which is normally just an On button in Windows). With the Amiga Forever CD safely on the shelf, press the On button again to boot in Windows.