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Boing!
How to play old Amiga games on your PC!

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It was 1985 when Commodore brought to the world the miracle of home computing - the Amiga 1000! When home computers were limited to 8-bits and the PCs could barely display 16 colors and make a speaker bleep, Amiga brought both color and sound to the world! With a palette of 4096 colors and the possibility of 32/64 colors on screen (under certain circumstances, even all 4096 on screen!) and full stereo 4-channel sound, the whole gaming world was rubbing their eyes and picking their jaws off the ground! (Note for historic accuracy: Around that time another 16-bit home computer appeared - the Atari 520ST - but it was technically so far behind the Amiga as to not bother with a comparison).

Unfortunately, A1000 was ungodly expensive, so few people were lucky enough to own one. Thankfully, this changed in 1987, when Commodore released the Amiga 500, a more affordable model that allowed every home to experience home computing. And although the A500 excelled in everything (e.g. graphics & animation, video & sound editing etc), home users were mainly interested in one thing: gaming! Gaming like no one had ever experienced before of all kinds and shapes. Among which, of course, there were dozens of adventures being constantly released, from the biggest companies of the time (Sierra, Lucasfilm, Level 9, Psygnosis) to the most unknown companies!

The years passed though and apparently Commodore was content to rest on its laurels while PC technology was rapidly advancing. By the time VGA and S-VGA were becoming the standard, Commodore decided - instead of coming up with a new, fully upgraded model - to do a “face lift” to the A500. This led to the release of the A500+ and A600, neither of which featured substantial upgrades. Eventually, in 1992, Commodore decided much too late, to release an upgraded model, the A1200 and A4000. This new model featured the all-new AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) chipset, which had a palette of 16.8 million colors and could display 256 colors on screen (524288 under certain circumstances).

Not only was it too late to play catch-up, but the fact that the majority of users still owned the older Amiga models convinced most game developers to not fully support the new AGA chipset. One of the biggest offenders was Sierra. Not only did they continue to release their new games with less colors in order to be compatible with the older models (and not even bothering to release two versions, like they were doing with EGA/VGA), but even their VGA remakes, like Leisure Suit Larry 1 or Space Quest 1, were still not taking advantage of AGA. So, with only a very small amount of games - and even less adventures - being released as AGA-only, more and more users were leaning towards the now colorful PCs, and, naturally, less and less games were developed for the Amiga. There were eventually some welcome exceptions such as Nightlong, Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2 and the Amiga-only cartoon-adventure 6th Sense Investigations, but that’s a drop in the ocean – and sad in a way, when one considers how important the Amiga had been…

The above prologue’s purpose was not intended to provide a detailed history of the Amiga computers, nor to fully describe their features. It was meant only as a fond reminiscence of those good old days sitting in front of the Amiga. And if - like me - you fondly remember those days and would like to relive them, or if you would like to see what all the fuss was about and get a taste of history, well, it is now possible with WinUAE, the Amiga emulator, and this article will guide you through the setup process so you can see that Kickstart hand on your screen (again)!

Downloading and Installing WinUAE

The first thing you must do is download WinUAE. The latest version at the time this guide was being written was 0.9.91. This version - as well as all versions above 0.8.22.R2 - require DirectX 8.0 or newer. If you have an older version of DirectX installed, you either need to update it or download an older version of WinUAE. Keep in mind that the Properties window layout will be different in an older version. This guide is written for WinUAE 0.9.91, but the main settings are pretty generic and may be able to be transferred to an older or newer version. UAE is also available for Mac and Linux.

After downloading WinUAE, run the .exe installer and select the path where you want the emulator to be installed. Now if you think you are ready to start playing... well, not quite yet!

Kickstart

In order for the emulation to start, Amiga’s ROM, called “Kickstart”, must be present. Kickstart was a chip that was something between a bios and part of an O/S. Thanks to the Kickstart, most of the programs (games, utilities etc) could boot directly from disk, without needing an O/S to be loaded first. A full O/S still existed, called “Workbench”, which featured a windowed environment years before "Windows" ever appeared!

There are several Kickstart versions, starting from v1.1. All Kickstart ROM chips have been exported to files and can be used by WinUAE. You will mainly need two versions though: v1.3, for all the old games, and v3.0 or v3.1 for the AGA enhanced games. After you have the Kickstart files, copy them in a folder named “Roms” in your WinUAE folder. Now you’re finally ready to start!

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