Amiga Forever Features

Amiga Forever comes in three editions that you can choose from:

• Online Edition (downloadable installer for Windows systems)
• Plus Edition (downloadable CD ISO image with additional Windows and platform-neutral content)
• Premium Edition (a physical package containing the Plus Edition CD and two DVDs, combined with an instant download of the installer for Windows)

All editions share the same preinstalled and ready-to-run Workbench 1.3 and 3.X environments. The Plus and Premium editions feature additional content and functionality on CD and DVDs.

Shared Content (All Editions)

Both the Online Edition and the other versions of Amiga Forever contain the following items:

• Preinstalled Workbench 1.3 environment (for compatibility with older games and other software) and Workbench 3.X environment (for productivity, internet access, etc.), running on top of a powerful JIT-enabled Amiga hardware emulation which also supports Amiga custom chips, RTG, SCSI, TCP/IP, AHI, up to 512 MB of Zorro III RAM, virtual memory, MIDI, native x86 code, etc. More...
• Preinstalled games, and support for downloaded games
• Preinstalled demos, including more than 10 original "First Demos" by Amiga, and support for downloaded demos
• A multitude of carefully-preinstalled quality Amiga applications, which include the AWeb browser (great for cross-browser testing), TCP/IP support tools, Personal Paint 7.1c (paint, animation and image processing software, includes GIF/LZW license), special version of CacheCDFS CD file system, AmigaAMP media player, 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, Directory Opus 5.5 (courtesy of GPSoftware), TurboText (exclusive latest version with bug fixes), MUI (shareware version), KingCON, FreeWheel, PowerSnap, ToolManager, ReqTools, etc.
• Compatibility with "Amiga OS 3.5"+ icons, NewIcons and MagicWB icons
• New and fully-licensed Picasso96 RTG software (not a shareware version), maps Amiga graphics requests directly to fast x86 calls and powerful low-level DirectX functions (Windows version of emulation)
• Amiga Narrator and Translator speech synthesis components (made available for distribution with the Amiga operating system for the first time since 1991, when Commodore-Amiga's licenses expired)
• Latest versions of WinUAE and WinFellow tested and supported by Cloanto (non-Windows versions included and/or available too)
• Launcher window with one-click controls
• Amiga Files software and folder to support future Windows systems
• Software Director for easy and privacy-conscious emulation news and updates

Additional Plus Edition Content

The Plus Edition of Amiga forever contains additional features which are not part of the Online Edition. These include:

• A collection of all Amiga ROM versions ever released, including A1000 boot ROMs, and extended CDTV and CD³² ROMs, accompanied by a similar selection of bootable Workbench disk images (for emulation use only)
• Gallery of multimedia items of historical interest
• KX Light boot environment, to optionally boot from CD (no Windows or other host OS required)
• Amiga Explorer software

The Plus Edition comes in a downloadable CD ISO image (requiring CD recording hardware and a blank CD). The physical Plus Edition CD is also included in the Premium Edition box.

Additional Premium Edition Content

The Premium Edition of Amiga forever contains the full Plus Edition CD, plus more than five hours of "must-see" Amiga videos on two dual-layer DVDs.

When purchasing the Premium Edition from the Amiga Forever Online Store you will also receive an instant license key and download link to the installer for Windows, so that you can start using the Amiga emulation and OS software without further delays, while the additional premium content is being shipped to you.

"Spiritual Content"

Like the amount of work that went into this project, some of the most important "features" of Amiga Forever are somewhat difficult to describe. They involve your feelings when you see the system booting from a slow floppy disk into a blue Workbench screen, and you suddenly seem to remember every word that appears on that Startup-Sequence window, and by listening to the emulated floppy drive sound you appear to be able to anticipate every disk head seek, as if it was a melody. And if you never experienced this before, then... welcome to the Amiga.

Even if you "were there" in those days, in the mid 1980s, you may be surprised to see and learn something new about events that made not only Amiga history, but computer history and culture. That is the goal of the Gallery and Videos sections (on the Plus Edition and Premium Edition), which include items of historical interest that were researched, digitized and restored with immense care and passion. Then just press a few buttons, and you are the one booting into the same Workbench 1.0 you just saw in a video, starting the Boing ball demo, or Juggler, or Robo-City, or listening to the Amiga's synthesized voice...

It is equally hard to describe the feeling of a "modern" Amiga system that just works as you would expect it to, with support for modern displays and hard drives, configuration-free internet access, a CD drive that does not require setting up drivers, devices and file systems, a mouse wheel that you could nowadays not do without, but which the original Amiga had never heard of, or a web browser preconfigured to use the same keyboard shortcuts as your PC, Mac or GNU/Linux system. With Amiga Forever, all of this attention to detail is just one mouse click away, as invisible as it is obviously ready to run.

Similarly, we believe that there is a certain magic involved when you see your familiar Amiga files appear on a Windows Explorer window by means of Amiga Explorer, or when you realize the technological contrast between the emulated CRT scan lines (an optional emulation feature) and the almost paper-thin LCD display you are now using to experience all of this again...