Amiga Forever Manifesto

The Amiga team at Cloanto, developers of Amiga applications since 1986, released the first version of Amiga Forever in 1997. These were difficult times for both the Amiga market (for financial reasons) and for emulation software in general (for legal reasons). In spite of this, and from the beginning, Amiga Forever included different operating system versions, running on a low-level emulation of the original Amiga hardware.

Amiga Forever remains true to the original goals, which are:

• To allow a maximum of old ("legacy") Amiga software and data to remain accessible and usable on modern hardware and operating systems
• To allow for easy data sharing between Amiga and other systems
• To allow Amiga hardware emulation to be legal, with respect and support for various emulation, operating system and application developers and users
• To maintain and extend an active portfolio of permissions and licenses to keep publishing original ROM and operating system components (even where the original licenses to Amiga Corporation, formerly Hi-Toro, and its successors, have expired)
• To allow new users to experience the original Amiga system
• To research, preserve and make accessible Amiga history and culture
• To provide continued support to all users of our original Amiga software titles
• To keep staying in touch with our Amiga Friends

A project like Amiga Forever includes constant internal development, hundreds of external contributions, licenses and updates, a high-bandwidth web and download system, technical support to both Amiga users who never used a PC and to PC users who never used an Amiga, and much more. This is time consuming and expensive, and nobody is getting rich out of it (which is also not the goal, as you may notice from the lack of advertising on this heavily-trafficked site). To the contrary, our efforts are "subsidized" by other projects and products, from which they also take away precious resources. This sometimes leads to discussions about how things could be done differently. Passion always tends to prevail.

Also, we have to admit that we are not always completely satisfied with the quality of certain details, or about some goals we missed in the current version, or about a few web pages which at some point are not up to date, or about the time it may take to answer some questions. Part of this is inevitable, not only because Amiga Forever would not be possible without open source and other components to which we try to contribute, but which are not under our control, but also because our own resources are limited, as is public interest. At the same time, we try to be as open as possible about this, for example by promptly disclosing known issues and limitations in the FAQ and Troubleshooting sections. And we keep working to constantly improve things.

The AmigaForever.com web site, which is also maintained by Cloanto's passionate team of Amiga developers and users, aims to be a site dedicated to "Classic" Amiga culture and support, even for non-Amiga Forever users.

All of this would not be possible without your continued support.

Thank You!