A: Amiga Forever requires Windows 2000, Windows XP,
Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, or a
higher version. Both x86 and x64 versions of Windows are
supported.
If you wish to use the emulation
components on a system other than Windows, please refer to this
page.
Amiga Emulation Software
An Intel Pentium,
Celeron, Xeon, Itanium or higher CPU, or a compatible CPU is
required. AMD CPUs work fine and are not known to require any
special settings. Cyrix CPUs work fine, although under Windows 95
they may require an option to be set in the emulation software.
Please note that the NexGen "586" CPU only supports the 386
instruction set, and as such it is not compatible with the
Pentium.
A "real" Amiga is not required for the Amiga emulation software to run, since
Amiga ROM ("Kickstart") and operating system ("Workbench") components are already included and conveniently preinstalled
in Amiga
Forever.
The Windows version of the Amiga emulation requires a display card and drivers supporting DirectX
9 or higher and hi-color or
true-color modes (i.e. 65536 colors or more). All modern display cards support this.
You can run Software Director to
automatically check for upgrades to Windows components which may
be required by the Amiga emulation. These are listed in the Amiga
Forever section of Software Director. Right-click an item to open
the download or home page of a component on the Microsoft web
site.
We also recommend to frequently visit the
Windows Update
site and install all critical upgrades which are available for
your operating system. The Windows Update site also lists new
versions of DirectX and other items which are used by the Amiga
emulation software. If you install either Windows Automatic
Updating or Windows Critical Update Notification, whichever is
available for your system, you won't have to worry about manually
checking for critical updates.
The Amiga emulation software requires DirectX
9.0 or higher. Windows 7 ships with at least DirectX 10.0, Windows Vista ships with at least DirectX 9.0, while Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 originally
shipped with at least DirectX 8.1, and like Windows 2000 can be updated
to version 9.0.
On all versions of Windows it is always good to have an up-to-date version of the
drivers for your display card, which is usually available for download from the web site
of the manufacturer of the card. Sometimes, especially on notebook
computers, display driver updates require an updated version of the computer
BIOS. Please refer to the manufacturer of your computer or mainboard for
BIOS and other hardware-related downloads.
When installing multiple components from the ones described here, we advise to proceed
in the following order, and reboot the system after each installation to verify that each
step was successful:
- BIOS update
- Display card driver update
- Windows Update
- DirectX updates
- Amiga Forever updates
Amiga Forever can actually be installed in any order with respect to the other items,
and it does not need to be reinstalled after other components are added. It is however a
good practice to make sure that each item affecting the system was completely installed
before installing a new one, and rebooting the system often remains the best way to do this. The
installation of Amiga Forever does not add or modify any system files.
The direct mounting of Amiga hard drives, introduced in Amiga Forever 5.1 for Windows, requires Windows XP,
Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, or a higher version.
The DOS versions of the Amiga emulators, which are normally not used on
Windows systems, and which may not be included in newer versions of Amiga
Forever, require VESA VBE drivers. If
these did not come with the computer or with the graphics board, they can be
installed separately using products such as SciTech Software's
Display Doctor.
Videos
The Premium Edition of Amiga Forever
includes high-quality video content on
two DVDs. The DVDs are "Region 0" (All Regions), and
the video content is in NTSC format (as in the original footage,
also compatible with most PAL DVD players).
Performance
While many users are satisfied with the performance of the emulation
low-end systems such as those powered by Pentium 90 to Pentium 200 CPUs, we recommend a Pentium processor running at
750
MHz as a minimum configuration. This provides a quite usable environment,
roughly comparable to the speed of an Amiga 500 with a fast hard disk,
inclusive of custom chips emulation. In
this configuration, the emulated CPU can be several times as fast as that of
an A500,
while the Amiga chip set is emulated in real time in most usage scenarios
(including most games).
With emulation running
on Intel Pentium CPUs, the original performance of the Amiga chip set is
achieved in the range between 400 MHz and 1 GHz, depending on the resources
used by the software (games are the most demanding applications). In
comparison the performance of CPU-intensive Amiga tasks on newer and more
powerful GHz-class PCs can be defined as stunning: jobs which used to take
minutes or hours on "real" Amiga systems only take seconds when run inside
the emulation. Additional
performance comparisons are included in the FAQ
list, and in the section on Amiga emulators.
Memory
The Amiga emulation requires about as much RAM as a real Amiga, plus some
memory necessary to run the emulation software itself (about 4 MB). AGA
emulation, if enabled, requires an additional 16 MB of RAM. The
RAM requirements to run the emulation software are not different than those
of any other Windows software. For an uncompromising use of Windows in
general, we recommend a configuration with at least 256 MB of RAM.
Both the Amiga emulation and the Amiga Explorer networking software have
been successfully tested on a system with only 16 MB of RAM. Several studies
have shown that the most effective way to improve the performance of an
average PC usually is to add more RAM.
Amiga Explorer
The Amiga Explorer data sharing software (which is not required by the emulation
components of Amiga Forever) is not as demanding as the
Amiga emulators, and, although designed for Pentium CPUs, should work properly on any 386,
486 or Pentium system with Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 or higher. The Amiga side of
Amiga Explorer requires Workbench 1.2 or higher.
If Amiga Explorer is used to transfer data between a PC and an Amiga,
then a null-modem serial cable or
Bluetooth adapter or a TCP/IP connection are required. Detailed instructions
on cabling and configuration are included with the software.
The Amiga Explorer software contains one Amiga executable file which must be copied to the Amiga
in order for the PC-Amiga networking software to run. This means that if the
software is downloaded and installed on a Windows system, then the "AExplorer" (Amiga program file) and
"AExplorer.info" (Amiga icon file) must be transferred to the Amiga using either
a terminal program (which works with the same null-modem cable required by Amiga
Explorer), or a floppy disk (which requires a
PC file system
on the Amiga side). The Amiga Forever CD-ROM includes the required Amiga
files on the CD-ROM. From version 3.5, Amiga Explorer includes a
revolutionary self-transferring Setup function to copy the required files to an Amiga
which has no internet connection, no CD-ROM
drive, no PC file system for the floppy drive, no terminal software, no Amiga Basic programming
language and no connection to the
external world other than the Amiga floppy drive. (In such a condition the
only recommended option used to be to ask a friend or
a friendly dealer with the necessary tools to put those files on an Amiga floppy disk.)
For system security reasons, under Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP,
Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 the optional installation of the Amiga Explorer
networking software can only be performed by a user with administrator rights. This
installation is the only part of Amiga Forever which requires a reboot (under Windows 95)
or a logoff/logon (Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows
XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008).
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