Cloanto's Amiga Forever
I've used UAE for quite a while now but always found it difficult to set up and run. Which was why I used Amiga in a box (AIAB) for quiet a while, but that tends to be very limiting in what you can do, but it does save the hassle of having to set the emulator up. So I was very glad to get hold of Cloanto's Amiga forever at the World Amiga show in November.
I've found this the easiest emulator or to use. For a start you have all the Amiga ROM's from 1.3 up to 3.1 included in the package plus with Cloanto's launcher its just one click to launch whichever version of the OS you want to use.Got any older games you want to play? No problem with Amiga Forever, just load up OS 1.3 and run the adf's of all your favourite games. And just press ALT/F4 to quit back to the Windows screen.
Another thing I found with this program was you can insert a CD when the program is running which you can't do with AIAB. With AIAB you have to insert the CD before you start the program, but with Amiga forever you can insert a CD at any time and will pick it up no problem. The only thing I did find doing it this way was the program won't let you install from the CD without first making an assign. The way I got round this was make an assign in the S:User-startup.
Click on the picture for a full screen view
Straight out of the box it looks like the picture above, with it's own icon bar at the bottom of the screen. But every Amigan I`ve ever met likes their machine set up to their own likes, and it didn`t take me long to install Opus Magellan and get it running the way I like it.
This version of UAE includes the Just-in-time version of emulation software (Bernd Meyer's JIT code), carefully configured and publicly benchmarked by Cloanto to be 30 times faster than in previous versions of Amiga Forever. The Amiga runs in a window or in full screen mode, makes full use of thousands of Windows (or other OS) drivers, can access PC files (even on NTFS partitions, in the Windows version) and does not require a reboot.
Another piece of software that comes with the CD is Amiga Explorer which with a NULL-Modem cable or via Ethernet (not supplied) let's you move all your favourite stuff from your Amiga over to the PC.
click on the picture for a full screen view
Preinstalled software includes: Personal Paint 7.1b (paint, animation and image processing software, includes GIF/LZW license), DirDiff (file synchronization and replication software), AmiToRTF (to convert texts from Amiga to Windows formats), MailBX (to convert Amiga mail archives to Microsoft Mail, Outlook Express and Exchange Server), drag-and-drop LhA, print spooler (easily print all Amiga documents under Windows, bypassing parallel port emulation), Directory Opus 5.5 (courtesy of GPSoftware), TurboText (exclusive latest version with stack problem fix), KingCON, ToolManager, etc.
The CD also includes some MPEG-1 videos: The Deathbed Vigil (one hour and 58 minutes, i.e. the full version of this "must have" video) and Jay Miner Speech (49 minutes)
So as you can see, this CD is everything you need to run a very fast Amiga on your PC. And because Amiga Forever is so versatile, setting up the emulator to your own needs is very easy. So I would definitely recommend you going out and getting the CD because your old Amiga won`t last forever, and this way you can run the Amiga OS on new hardware and still run all your favourite programs and games.
