winUAE

[alx]

@wholenutz

Welcome to A.org :-)

As InTheSand hinted, a good way to get going quickly with emulation would be to grab Amiga Forever.  It comes with a load of legal ROMs (unless you own an Amiga yourself you shouldn't really be downloading them) and everything's preconfigured to go (if for some reason it didn't then you'd be perfectly entitled to demand a refund, but I've never heard of it not working :-D )

If you've got real Amiga disks, there are a few ways to transfer them onto the PC.  If you're running WinXP then have a look at ADFRead (there's a news article about it on the front page here) - it requires you have two floppy drives though.  If you're using a DOS-based windows then there's a similar utility called "Disk2FDI".  There's also a PCI card called the "Catweasel" that can let you read Amiga disks, or you could convert the disks to ADFs on a real Amiga and send them across a network/CD-R etc.

[alx]

Not entirely.  The problem is that while the Classic Amiga's floppy controller could read virtually every disk format known to man, the PC's is far more limited and cannot read Amiga disks.  There's a very cunning hack round this where you install two floppy drives and, by getting the machine to read one and then swap control to the other mid-read, get data off the Amiga disk.

The original program to manage this was "Disk2FDI".  It's a DOS program and requires certain hardware access that newer NT-based Windowses don't allow.  If you're running Windows 9x then this would be your best choice.

ADFRead does exactly the same thing but runs under WinNT and derivatives.  I'm guessing that you might be running Windows XP, in which case this is the program you'd want.  As far as I know, there's no such program for any other OS like Linux or MacOS (though if you've got a PC running Linux you could get a DOS startup disk and run Disk2FDI from there).

The two floppy drives is critical, however.  A standard PC with one floppy drive cannot read Amiga disks in any way.  You have to have either another drive, a catweasel or a Classic Amiga.

[alx]

>that would cost even more, i sold my A1200 a few years ago for £20, im really regretting that now

If you did want to get a real Amiga you might be able to find one cheaper than you imagine.  I bought my A1200 a few years ago for about £20 (apologies if by some co-incidence that happened to be you and I stole your remaining Classic Machine - you don't live in Stratford, do you? :-P )

As for the whole legality of downloading kickstart ROMs, I can completely agree with people who think buying AF isn't worth it for just one or two games; Apple released System 7 for free use, which is a lot newer than WB1.3.  That said, Amigans have a very good reason to be against piracy in any form; rampant copying of games and applications was one reason (among many others, of course) for the platform's almost total demise in the first place.