Oh, freaking awesome. I love it when there is a solution for me that simply involves money rather than study, effort and comprehension!
And Super Skidmarks is there. Oh hellz yeah.
I think instead that a lot of the appeal is that these games are MORE playable than when they were new. You don’t have a problem with them running poorly, and on the internet you can find manuals and walkthrough, so you don’t have anymore to spends hours just trying to figure out some obscure mechanics.
For example right now I’m having fun reading Driller manual: SFODB - The SixtyFour Originals DataBase
What kind of games come in these Amiga Forever bundles? It just has a quantity with no listings. Am I going to find the stuff I’m going to be nostalgic about (Psygnosis stuff, etc) or is it mostly things I may not have heard of?
Tempted to pick up an Amiga bundle - I have many fond memories of those years.
There are certain requirements if you want to do things “my way”. You need to find:
- kickstart roms
- the disk version of workbench 3.1
The process in broad lines is about configuring the amiga as a 1200, configure an hard disk (and make it bootable). Then boot the amiga with the workbench floppy, and use it to install on the hd.
After you’ve done this you can exit the program and go look in the hard disk directory. The workbench install should have created, between other things, a “C” and “S” directory. Now look here: http://www.whdload.de/
You can get the first package, open it with winrar or something and copy the files in the C and S directories onto your amiga hard disk “C” and “S” directories. This should make WHLoad “install”.
At this point you merely need to grab the prepackaged games from a certain site and just run them.
Though, I should say there are more games worth it than just Lord of Chaos ;)
Beside those that run also on PC there’s: Amberstar, Ambermoon, Black Crypt, Captive, Bloodwych, Dragon Wars, Dragon Flight, Fate Gates of Dawn, Hired Guns, Legend of Faerghail, Questron 2 etc…
There are a lot :)
(in the meantime I’m halfway through Driller. Fun and simple game)
haven’t read this entire thread yet, but will come back later to see if I can get Starflight Amiga running with this new-fangled whachamazinga. (Was an ST person…will need walkthrough for AmigaOS…)
Played around a bit with the new versions. The Amiga version’s super-simple if you want to run old games (point it to the disk file and there are “RP9” files online that are automatically downloaded and set up all the emulation parameters correctly for you; it also includes the whdload thing HRose mentions if you want to take that approache).
But if you were ever an Amiga user who used it as your main computer instead of just a game machine, the environments it support are awesome.
That AmiKit is a distribution that includes all the major utilities, etc. to set up a hi-res, high-color Amiga emulation, with web browsers, whdload, utilities, some freeware games, and everything else all installed and configured. It’s super-slick. I gave up on using my Amiga for productivity when Win 95 shipped, so I didn’t realize they’d added so many modern conveniences to the Amiga OS:
You can also set up plain vanilla classic Amigas to run older games, of course.
C64 Forever is less elaborate, but again, along with the 100 free games it includes (a mix of abandonware and freeware), it’s super-easy to add your own games to the list. If they have an RP9 file, it will have all the emulator settings optimized, but if not, it’s easy to custom-configure them (fastload, controller, etc.) for each game so you never have to mess with it again.
For instance, I took the Elite disk (.D64) file and loaded it, and it popped up with a list of possible programs (showing only Elite) and I selected it, and it auto-configured everything.
(Also, the version of Elite that exists in my memory is way better than the one that exists in reality. :)
Ooooooooooooooohhhh, Elite. I think I’m sold sir. So many space games in the 80’s were on the Amiga and C64, so I never played 'em, and these look like perfect ways to do so.
Play the Amiga version of Elite, Brian. That’s generally true with most games when you have a choice of both of those platforms. :)
Hoooooooollllly crap.
Interesting idea. I’m familiar with the DOS versions of many games, but the Amiga versions are both different and prettier, so it’d be like a journey of discovery as well as a review. Huh.
Also, where did you get those? (PM please) ;)
Also, the Value version will be fine to run games, won’t it?
My problem is that I’ll want a good old digital joystick, and I don’t know what I can use. Needs autofire as well.
Dammit, Denny. I really need to get the Amiga one. Any idea if the videos are worthwhile in the expensive version? Maybe I’ll spot myself in footage from an old AmiExpo!
You can find all kinds of information on the Amiga games at lemonamiga.com. C64.com for 64 stuff.
It’s fine for the older Amiga games, about 70% of them. But the Value version only emulates up to the Amiga 500/2000. The later 256-color (referrred to as AGA - Advanced Graphics Adapter) games require AmigaDOS 2.04 or 3.0, though, so you want the high-end version of the emulator for that.
There are some USB versions of classic digital joysticks; search on “Competition Pro,” for instance. I want someone to do a USB version of the Epyx 500XJ.
I found a company that does USB versions of the classic Atari joystick. I picked up a couple of those, and they’re… well, as good as the old Atari joystick.
USB gamepads, such as the Xbox 360 wired controller, work well too.
Vesper, there’s the Amiga launch, a couple of Jay Miner interviews, and the Deathbed Vigil when Commodore died. (I watched that last one on a VHS I bought directly from Dave Haynie. :) There’s also a Dave Haynie 2009 interview that’s not on my old disc version. (My discs are ancient; I’ve been digitally upgrading for years.)
Thanks Denny, I’ll get the plus version eventually. ;-)
The plus side is that Elite 2 runs MUCH better than how it ran at the time since you can speed it up and be really smooth.
But in Elite 2 case there’s not really much difference with the PC version.
Modern gamepads aren’t fine enough?
Hey Denny, I saw a 3rd chipset called AGA - this is even newer than ECS right? There’s a fair number of games listed on lemonamiga for it.
Oh, and LOTS of the classics are superbly playable today. They really stand the test of times:
- Speedball 2 (it’s HARD)
- Sensible World of Soccer (it’s IMPOSSIBLE!)
- Alien Breed Tower Assault (it’s HARD!)
- Worms
- Cannon Fodder
- Syndicate
AGA= Amiga 1200
More colors, essentially.
Yeah, brain fart… AGA is the 256-color chipset. ECS was a minor update that added more Chip (graphics) memory and some other tweaks. AGA is the one found on the Amiga 1200 and 4000.
So…still the plus version? ;-)