HOW TO: Install Amiga OS4.1 on a Windows PC

I’d dabbled a lot in trying to get an Amiga emulator running on my PC but I wasn’t able to make head nor tail of where to get kickstarters, ROMs or workbench files. Not having a clue and wanting to do everything legally, I first turned to Cloanto and their Amiga Forever product.

Amiga Forever

The main benefit of going down this route, as I saw it then (and still do now), was that the Amiga Forever solution provides kickstarter ROMs and workbench confirgurations all set up and ready to go.

With this, I was able to back up configurations and play with them, to see how things were hanging together and to get the basics established in my mind.

The most functional system there is based on Amiga OS 3.x which I understand to be a mishmash of the latest Amiga technologies based on the classic system while avoiding political and legal issues with some license holders.

Wanting to try and get as ‘authentic’ yet functional as possible, I purchased AmigaOS 3.1.4 and installed that thanks to help from the 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast. This means I didn’t really need to have purchased Amiga Forever, but I think this has all helped me understand how things work. Slowly building this up and backing up the disk file as I progress, this has become my main system for a while.

AmigaOS 4

Research led me to believe that AmigaOS 4 was a workable solution so I bought and installed this onto WinUAE. I’m still working on this as I currently find it to be rather inconsistent, sometimes working well and sometimes inexplicably crashing. I am still tweaking this from time to time, but it’s not a priority.

I’ve used two methods of installing this, manually and via Flowerpot. As I understand it, there are extra dimensions to emulating this since it is designed for the PowerPC platform.

AmiKit

Now AmiKit is a fascinating solution! This is classic Amiga but jazzed up to the gills with fancy themes, preconfigured applications, multimedia capabilities, simplified and automated installation and it will even launch Windows Apps from its own interface (passing commands up through WinUAE)!

This is a fantastic configuration and it could easily become a daily driver for someone looking for something that looks modern but has Amiga at its core (though I am finding some minor issues with it).

Being the stick-in-the-mud that I am, I still want to use my ‘vanilla’ 3.1.4 platform and transferring files from the AmiKit setup 'disk’ meant that I was able to take advantage of the AmiKit config.

The Way Forward For Now

So, for now, my ‘main’ (virtual) machine is AmigaOS 3.1.4 running on an emulated Amiga 4000, but I have built this by installing AmigaOS 3.1.4 from the original floppy disk files built up that configuration as I go along - as I continue to do.

A Note on Solutions

Cloanto’s Amiga Forever 7 (2017 Edition) – Still The Best

Workbench 3.x running on Cloanto’s Amiga Forever 7. 2017 marks the twentieth anniversary of Cloanto’s Amiga Forever series. Over that time, Cloanto has continued to, release after release, create the finest Amiga emulation package for Windows. Amiga Forever 7 certainly continues that tradition. Amiga Forever 7 Install Screen Visually, little has changed with Amiga Forever, and most of this…