Commodore Amiga
Les Pounder reveals how to install a hard drive in a virtual Amiga 1200, enabling him to relive the glory days of the 1990s Amiga scene.
Les Pounder reveals how to install a hard drive in a virtual Amiga 1200, enabling him to relive the glory days of the 1990s Amiga scene and more!
Back in 1989 Tim Burton’s Batman movie was in the cinema, and advertising campaigns were in full swing to promote the Caped Crusader. At Commodore, its marketing team had signed a deal with Warner Bros. Pictures and Batman was to be on the Amiga. The Amiga 500 “Batman Pack” was our introduction to the Amiga and it started a life-long love for the machine.
But the Amiga 500 was not the first machine. That honour goes to the Amiga 1000 as used in 1985 by Andy Warhol to digitally alter a photograph (look up the floodfill bug – Ed) of Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry. The Amiga 500 was the machine that made the biggest impact on the 16-bit home computing scene. With its 512KB of RAM and a 68000 7MHZ CPU, the Amiga 500 was much more than a games machine. It was a competent office computer, with printers and floppy disks on which to save our work. It was a music creation tool using sound tracker tools and virtual mixing desks, it was an artist’s studio where they could create paintings, animations and 3D digital art via the mouse and a myriad of aftermarket add-ons. The Amiga was also a television workhorse, capable of mixing live television with graphics created on the Amiga.
The Amiga was expensive, retailing for around £399 in 1990, but that was far cheaper than an IBM PC compatible of the era. What the Amiga had that the PC didn’t were custom chips that handled various aspects of the computer. “Gary” controlled the floppy drives, “Denise” handled video data, “Paula” handled audio playback, serial ports, mouse joystick and floppy drive control. These chips were cost-reduced over the life of the Amiga and replaced with other named chips in future models. What made the Amiga interesting? What can we do with it and is it still in use today? Let’s find out…
Emulating the Amiga
Amiga hardware comes in three conditions. Pristine re-capped (capacitors replaced and the board serviced) machines that see their cases returned to original colour by retro-bright (a bleaching solution). It can also come as hacked/modded hardware with extra boards and cards added to power up the Amiga for the 21st century. Finally, it can be a loft/barn/garage find that sees the Amiga battered and filthy and in need of restoration.
Whatever form it takes, Amiga hardware is expensive and so emulation is a great way to get interested. For Windows users there is Cloanto’s Amiga Forever. An emulation suite that provides all of the files necessary to emulate many models of Amiga and a range of applications. For around €50 we can pick up the premium edition with three DVDS of software and videos. Raspberry Pi users can install Amibian (www. amibian.org), which is a full Amiga-centric distro for the Pi. All you need to bring is your Kickstart ROMS and disk images for an instant hit of nostalgia. There are other emulators for Windows, Linux and macos such as
FS-UAE (WIN-UAE for Windows) that provides a friendly and expansive means with which to experience the Amiga. And this is where we start our journey – emulating an Amiga 1200 on our Ubuntu machine.
Installation
To emulate an Amiga we shall use FS-UAE, available from https://fs-uae.net/download. Download the
Close the shell and press F12 to release the mouse from the emulator. Close the emulator window and go back to the Launcher.
Virtual hard drives
A hard drive was a luxury for the earlier Amigas. With the release of the 600 and 1200 we saw built-in IDE interfaces and 600HD and 1200HD models were on the shelves, offering a whopping 40MB IDE hard drive.
For our virtual Amiga 1200 we’re going to install a 256MB (4GB OS limit) hard drive using FS-UAE. To start, click the Amiga logo in the top left of the window and select HDF Creator. We shall create a Single Partition Hard Disk File, called Lxf.hdf and it’ll be 256MB in size. This single file, saved to the Hard Drives directory for our setup, will act as a virtual hard drive in Workbench. Click Create and the drive is now available for use.
Click the Home icon and ensure that your Amiga Model is A1200, with 3.1 ROM and 68020 CPU. Click the Floppy disk menu and in the top slot insert Workbench 3.1 ADF disk and in the second slot insert the
Workbench 3.1 Install disk. Move down to Media Swap List, and click the + icon, select all of your Workbench 3.1 disks, of which “install” should be present. Skip to the Hard Drive menu and ensure Lxf.hdf is present.
Next, go to the RAM & ROM menu, ensure that the correct Kickstart ROM is present, and set your Chip RAM to 2MB, and Fast RAM to 8MB. Before we start the emulator, look to the left of the Launcher window. You’ll see a large white box and this is where a list of pre-configured machines should be, but we haven’t created any yet. In the white text box under the large white box, add the name A1200 LXF and click the Save button (this looks like a red arrow pointing to a hard drive) to save the configuration. Click Start to run the emulator.
Workbench will boot as before, but now we see an additional icon on the desktop – DH0 NODOS – which is our 256MB hard drive. We need to format this drive, so single left click the icon, and then press and hold the right mouse button. Move the mouse to the top of the screen and select Icons, Format Disk. Set the format options as follows:
Format: DH0
Current Information: Device ‘DH0’ 256M capacity
New Volume Name: WB3
Put Trashcan: Y
Fast File System: Y
International Mode: N
Directory Cache: N
We then need to click Format, and then in the next two pop-ups click OK and Format. In about five minutes there’ll be a new drive, DH0 (first hard drive) which is ready for use.
Double-click the Install disk icon and then doubleclick the Install folder. Double-click your chosen language to run the installer in that language. The next screen will ask if we would like to install Workbench 3.1 to a hard drive: click Proceed. The installation mode is Novice, click Proceed With Install to move on. Language is set to English (or your chosen language), we can skip the printer setup screen, and the keymap should match your country/language selection.
The installer will now run and copy the files from the floppy drives to the virtual hard drive. At times there’ll be prompts for us to insert another disk, and luckily we set up the swap list via the Launcher before we started the install. Press F12 and move down to REMOVABLE MEDIA. Press Enter and select the correct disk (Locale, Extra, Fonts and Storage are used during the install process) and press Enter to eject the previous disk and automatically insert the next. The Amiga will detect the disk change and carry on with the install. Once the install is complete, you’ll be asked to eject the disk from the drive, again do this via F12 - REMOVABLE MEDIA. Then click Proceed to reboot. In a few seconds your fresh A1200 will boot directly from the hard drive!
Demoscene
The Amiga demoscene is still a hotbed of creativity despite it being 35 years since the Amiga 1000 was launched. The Amiga was much more than a gaming and productivity platform. It introduced digital workflows to artists and musicians who harnessed the custom chips to create their work. This was showcased in the demoscene, a scene that we’d seen previously with the Commodore 64.
The demoscene is where Amiga artists, coders and musicians collaborated to create demos that pushed the hardware to its limits. Some of the demo creators came from the hacking scene, the scene where “cracktros”, short demos that announced who cracked the pirated game that you were playing, were common.
Demos were mainly written using 68000 assembly language, but also written in C. No matter the language, the demos served to showcase the talents of those that created it. They took the limited hardware and pushed it well past its initial capabilities. Artists and designers would use packages such as Deluxe Paint and Imaging
(a 3D rendering engine) to create their art assets, while musicians would use music tracker software to sequence instruments and capture loops and samples via cartridge-based capture devices. The coders on the team would then add these assets together using their code and all of this was often contained within 880Kb, the typical capacity of an Amiga floppy disk. Notable demos on the Amiga were Equinox’s
Leviathan (1991). This was a team made up of coders and artists from multiple demoscene groups across Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1992 a rather controversially named demo, Jesus
on E’s was released by Leeds Spreading Division (LSD) and it blew many away with its technical prowess. This huge demo spanned two floppy disks and was based upon a series of looping animations set to a buffered music track. The rave-inspired music disk was coded to showcase the fact that the older A500, A500+ and A600 (OCS/ECS chipsets) were still capable of grabbing our attention.
The first demo that we ever saw was in 1991 and it was from Quartex and Alliance Design. It was called
Substance and it mixed elements of 2D and 3D animation, along with user interaction via the joystick. The music featured guest artists Alcatraz and Moby (no not that Moby) and was an electronic dance track, quite slow in tempo compared to other demos of the time.
The demoscene was not just about rave music. Artists such as Tobias Richter were famous in the Amiga community for their skills with Deluxe Paint and animation packages. Richter came to fame for a series of Star Trek-inspired animations, made available via the many BBS and PD (Public Domain) libraries. These animations placed Richeter in high regard among fellow Star Trek fans including Doug Drexler who worked on various Star Trek series from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Drexler used some of Richter’s CG models, created in Maya, for the re-release of Star Trek: The Next
Generation on Blu-ray. So the Amiga has some part to