New to the Amiga world

[AmigaChild]

Hi, I am brand new to the concept of Amiga. To be honest I was born the year before Commodore filed bankruptcy, so I really had only heard of Amiga growing up. Recently in frustration, I had given up on linux, windows, and mac. They just don't seem to hold up to the standards of modern technology. So, I met a friend who had Amiga OSXL running on his computer and it was love at first sight.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but how do I go about running Amiga OS on MY PC.
                                                                             -AmigaChild:lol:

[TheBilgeRat]

Honestly, I think the best way is to buy AmigaForever2010 (or 2011, whatever year they're on about these days ).  That will give you an entire environment to play around with without the need for new hardware.  It will need windoze beneath it make it run, but there are lots of folks here who can tell you how to make that part of it nearly invisible.

As for other solutions, there are:

1.  Buy a supported PPC Macintosh and install MorphOS on it

2.  Buy a SAM460 from AmigaKit or Vesalia and install AmigaOS4.1 on it

3.  Buy a classic Amiga from some blighter here or on AmiBay and Install Amiga OS 3.1 to 3.9 on it

4.  Buy a supported Intel machine and install AROS on it.

All are fun, all are Amiga.

[AmigaChild]

Thanks so much! I appreciate it.

[RepoOne]

I'm like you; I was also born the year before Commodore filed bankruptcy (1993). At this point, I have an A1200 with a modest 4MB expansion, an A1000 with 512K chip, a PowerPC Mac G4 with MorphOS, an A500 on the way (perhaps), and a system with AROS, as well as UAE on my main PC.

The world of Amiga is awesome. Just say what you want to do, and people here will be able to suggest all sorts of software and hardware combinations that will allow you to do it.

If you want a classic Amiga experience, get an A500 with a bunch of disks or an A1200 with FastRAM and a hard drive to run WHDLoad on. There's also something new called the Minimig which is an implementation of an ECS A500 on a small FPGA board.

If you want to go modern, go with an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator (not cheap), a PPC Mac with MorphOS installed, or x86 with AROS. One could also wait around for the NatAmi or AmigaOne machines, but those have been in development for a very long time and will probably be rather expensive at launch (especially the AmigaOne).


Of course, there are emulation options. WinUAE is always good, especially with AmigaForever. X-Amiga is a special distribution of Linux made for use with UAE, and Amithlon, despite being inactive for several years, is still pretty good if one's hardware can run it.

[AmigaChild]

Sorry to post again but has anyone on viewed or tried this:

http://www.osnews.com/story/604

[A1260]

Sorry to post again but has anyone on viewed or tried this:

http://www.osnews.com/story/604

amigaos xl is no more... just go for aros, it is everything amiga xl wanted to be. it is open source and free, it run on your x86 pc..
http://aros.sourceforge.net/

[AmigaChild]

amigaos xl is no more... just go for aros, it is everything amiga xl wanted to be. it is open source and free, it run on your x86 pc..
http://aros.sourceforge.net/

I've found some places I can purchase/download amigaos xl. Is that not legit?
:confused:

[zylesea]

I've found some places I can purchase/download amigaos xl. Is that not legit?
:confused:

The download is almost for sure not okay and the sales are only okay if they are used original disks. AmigaOSXL/Amithlon died years ago.
You may consider MorphOS - all you need is a G4 Mac with Radeon gfx (Mac mini, Powermac G4 or some eMac) to freely testdrive it. If you don't know about MorphOS yet you may start with the five minute read "What is MorphOS at http://via.i-networx.de/wim.htm .

[RepoOne]

If you really would like to turn your PC into something a lot like an Amiga, as said, try X-Amiga.

http://www.xamiga.net/index.html

It's a lightweight Linux distribution that allows you to boot to an emulated Amiga system as soon as you turn your PC on, so it's like your computer is a very fast classic Amiga machine.

[tasmanian guy]

The download is almost for sure not okay and the sales are only okay if they are used original disks. AmigaOSXL/Amithlon died years ago.
You may consider MorphOS - all you need is a G4 Mac with Radeon gfx (Mac mini, Powermac G4 or some eMac) to freely testdrive it. If you don't know about MorphOS yet you may start with the five minute read "What is MorphOS at http://via.i-networx.de/wim.htm .

I tried Morphos and it is a bit daunting to a new user of the system.  It looks great, but I couldn't work out how to install my ADF disks of various programs.
 
I think if you're a more expert user, you can do whatever you want, but for new users, I wish there was a guide in getting your Amiga software across for new users of Morphos and a compatibility guide, that would be fantastic to help out new users.

[Karlos]

I tried Morphos and it is a bit daunting to a new user of the system.  It looks great, but I couldn't work out how to install my ADF disks of various programs.
 
I think if you're a more expert user, you can do whatever you want, but for new users, I wish there was a guide in getting your Amiga software across for new users of Morphos and a compatibility guide, that would be fantastic to help out new users.

You could try asking over at MorphZone. They weren't taking on new user registrations for a short while, but as far as I know, it's all business as usual there now.

I'm pretty sure there are tools for mounting .adf images as disks. The only issues you are likely to encounter are those that require access to the original amiga hardware (including requiring non-rtg capable displaymodes). If you do have such an application, E-UAE should work. Anything properly system-friendly and rtg/ahi compatible should pretty much just work. Personally, I wish Octamed Soundstudio wasn't one of the sad exceptions to that rule, but I guess you can't have everything.

[trekiej]

Welcome.

[HenryCase]

I've found some places I can purchase/download amigaos xl. Is that not legit?
:confused:

Are you sure it'll work on your PC? As others have said, AmigaOS XL isn't developed anymore, so you'd be taking a risk. Of course you could *cough* download it for free to try it out, but you didn't hear that from me, right? ;-)

Honestly, I think there are three relatively pain-free ways to get into the Amiga scene:

1. Run AROS. Download a live CD from here, it's free and you don't need to install it if you don't like it:
http://www.icarosdesktop.org/

2. Run MorphOS. You can have a full MorphOS system for probably £200 if you shop around. Basically you want to get a PPC Mac from eBay that's supported by MorphOS. If you're interested, let us know and we'll help you put together a system.

3. Run UAE. UAE, in it's many forms, is the premier Amiga emulation solution. It's easy to play around with, the only hurdle to cross is getting Amiga Kickstart ROMs so that programs can run. You can do this legally by buying Amiga Forever:
http://www.amigaforever.com/

All three of these options are relatively cheap (or in the case of AROS, free). If you didn't want to buy a new computer and wanted something that gave you a good experience out of the box, I'd say go for Amiga Forever. Amiga Forever comes with KX Light, which you can think of as the successor to Amiga XL (it's not really the same, but the seamless experience should be):
http://www.amigaforever.com/kxlight/
http://www.amigaforever.com/tour/af_kxlight_boot.html

Hope this helps. Please feel free to ask questions, we were all beginners at one point. :-)

[MaximvsPayne]

there are some nice AROS-Distributions out there: http://www.aros-broadway.de/ this is one of them! try it out, its free and open source!! amiga rulez

[freqmax]

As x86-PC, Mac, PPC, emulators etc.. not really is Amiga the way it was. Buy a real one or try the newer FPGA implementations:

Have a look here:
http://fpgaarcade.com/
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=55885

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig