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FeaturesMain »» Tutorials
A Guide for WinUAE: 3. Acquiring legally free software for AmigaOS 
(Read 20884 times) | The Amiga has been an important birthing ground for "Pubic Domain," "Freeware" and "Shareware" applications, gaming and demo Scenes. This is an important reason why there are over 50,000 software titles written for the Amiga platform. Of these, over 5000 Amiga games were written, but a majority of these were targeted at low-end 7Mhz OCS/ECS Amiga systems from mid-late 80s and early 90s. Regardless of what the age may suggest to you, even these early machines are very powerful systems for 2D games and at the time State-of-the-Art for 3D gaming as well. The first Amigas were released the same year as when Nintendo introduced its NES gaming console in 1985. But as can be judged from the videos below the Amiga platform was a lot more powerful! Actually even the most basic entry-level Amigas have been more powerful 2D gaming platforms than even the Super NES (which was released in 1991). For example the following four games run well on any Amiga with 1 MB of memory.
(Click on the screenshots for more information, video links are included below)
Ruff 'n Tumble demonstration video (HD version)
Traps 'n Treasures demonstration video (HD version)
Mr Nutz video demonstration video (HD version)
Tower Assault demonstration video (HD version)
Sadly most Amiga arcade conversions are NOT as good as the arcade originals (IMO exceptions include games like Pang, Rodland and Toki) . At the time this was mainly due to companies preferring people to spend lots of cash at arcades halls instead of just buying a single Amiga conversion or cutting costs by not or only slightly enhancing the AtariST conversion (for instance by adding stereo sound or parallax scrolling background layers). For instance the Amiga conversion of the arcade classic 'The New Zealand Story', which despite still of being an excellent game on the Amiga, offers less colorful graphics than even the 8-bit coin-up original (arcade vs Amiga). This despite of the fact that any Amiga could easily have handled identical graphics, but instead the game offers graphics identical to the AtariST coversion! Luckily, there are good arcade emulators like MAME available for most platforms, including for AmigaOS. So to really understand how powerful low-end or high-end Amiga models were at the time, you would mostly need to look for software specificly targeting the Amiga platform. A good place to start is the AIAB website which offers several Amiga classics including Lemming, Walker and Shadow of the Beast free for download. Other good locations for games are: AMI Sector One, Borrowed Time, Classic Cinemaware Games and Factor 5. However note that the distribution right are either owned by these companies or permissions were given specificly to these 3rd party websites for distributing the offered software titles. German: Amigaland.
 Recently Dream17 has been given permission from the highly acclaimed software house Team17 to host ADFs and IPF (CAPS) Disk images of their Team17 titles. Team17 originated from the Amiga community and started out as a small business and has meanwhile grown into a very successful games company especially due to their popular Worms game series. Worms is a mixed Tank / Lemmings-clone originally developed for the Amiga platform. An Amiga only version of "Worms: The Director's cut" (AGA) is available as well. Also amongst the Team17 games is one of the first real Doom-beaters for the Amiga. Sadly ID Software never ported Doom to the the Amiga as they claimed that AGA computers were not capable enough. However Team17's "Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds" was the first AGA Doom clone to truly prove them wrong without any reasonable doubt as this game is technically far more advanced. The game features advanced moving light sources and unlike Doom offers the ability to look up and down. Of course now that Doom has become open source, this game has also been ported to AmigaOS and now even runs on old OCS/ECS Amigas from the 80s next to the more modern AGA models! Running AB3DII-TKG with WinUAE results in some occasional graphic glitches which you can judge yourself by watching the video below. Amazingly TKG is less than 2 MB of size and thus makes Doom look like a bloated pig in comparison! Well done Team17!
Superfrog demonstration video (HD version)
AlienBreed 3d II - TKG video demonstration video (HD version)
Boulderdash / Emerald Mine type games are well served at the Emerald Web website. Here there are hunderds of clones being offered freely for download.
The website 'Amiga Games That Weren't' (AGTW) collects all kinds of information about games that were never released to the public. Some nice games that were completed in the past are now available, such as Ocean's nice Amiga conversions of Snow Bros and Liquid Kids.
The Software Preservation Society (SPS), formerly the Classic Amiga Preservation Society (CAPS), dedicates itself to the preservation of software for the future, namely classic games. They do not re-distribute software without given permission, but want to preserve the software for when the copyrights expire and prevent the software stored on eroding magnetic media would forever be lost.
Finally the center of most freely distributable classic Amiga software is Aminet.
Some last WinUAE emulation tips and information:
- Windows PCs are not able to handle emulated Amiga screens very well. Therefore most AIAB applications are configured to be displayed on the desktop screen instead of opening their own screens. On real Amigas it is often preferable to use a separate screen specificly configured for the application so that you would always get a full screen application with the resolution and color depth for which the software was designed for. However if you switch between different screens using different display properties under WinUAE, you will get a black screen when switching (sometimes you will shortly see the underlying Windows desktop as well) for a couple of seconds which can be annoying to Amiga users. It is better to either make sure that the same display properties have been selected for all screens or to mainly use the main desktop screen.
- Screen dragging: This very useful and unique feature is sadly disabled for three earlier metioned Amiga software emulation packages.
- For good dedicated forums regarding UAE and Amiga games, there is Amiga Emulation Talk and the EAB WinUAE board.
- When downloading software you will encounter several icon styles. Some icons are drawn with only 4 colors as this saves system resources on old un-upgraded Amiga models. Another widely used icon style is MagicWB which only uses 8 colors but looks reasonable good and works fast on un-upgraded A1200 systems. However AIAB and AmigaSYS both come supplied with NewIcons with up to 256 colors as well as true color PNG icons (AmigaSYS only in combination with AmigaOS 3.9). Truckloads of free NewIcons can be found on Aminet and on specific Icon websites like Zapaticons. GlowIcons are similar to NewIcons and has become the standard for Amiga modern Amiga icons and offer "glowing" alternative states when selected. AmigaOS3.5 (1999) introduced an updated icon.library and therefor many icons found on the internet (like these nice Game Icons or these box cover Exoticons) cannot be used directly with AmigaOS 3.0/3.1. If you want to make classic AmigaOS look very modern yourself there's also the PowerIcons patch for AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 which allows you to use 24-bit color PNG icons with or without alpha channel. Various Amiga / MorphOS related PNG icons can be found here and KDE Linux icons can also be used. Comparison workbench screenshots: Normal 256 color classic icons and 24-bit PNG icons.
For a quick comparison between various AmigaOS icon sets have a look at the screenshots listed below.
My personal favourite is Ken's regularly updated icon set.
Ken's OS4 icons- Screenshot 1 - (Download)
Ken's OS4 icons - Screenshot 2
Ken's OS4 icons - Screenshot 3
Ken's OS4 icons - Screenshot 4
Mason's old OS4 icons - Screenshot - (Download)
Tony's PNG icons - Screenshot - (Download)
Virgola's PNG icons - Screenshot - (Download)
Miscellaneous PNG icons - Screenshot
Many nice toolbar replacement images and icons are also available at MasonIcons.
If you prefer the AIAB icon set style then please note that only a small selection and downscaled icons have been included into this package. You can download the whole icon pack from dAMIr's website. For some of the PNG images you will have to change them manually into icons, simply by renaming the *.png extensions into *.info file extensions. (This can be done with any PNG image, so you can easily use your digital photographs as icons as well!) Have a look at the screenshots below for a preview:
dAMIr's PNG icons - Screenshot 1
dAMIr's PNG icons - Screenshot 2
dAMIr's PNG icons - Screenshot 3
- Some games don't run properly when the JIT emulation is enabled. Often JIT-enabled problems result in distorted sound and graphic glitches. You can disable JIT emulation at any time during the emulation by setting the "Cache Size" slider under the "JIT Settings" group on the "CPU" tab to 0-Megs or with newer releases by simply de-selecting JIT. Don't forget to re-adjust these settings when you return to AmigaOS, as the emulation would slowdown considerably.
- If at any time a game is running too slow you can alter the "Refresh" slider under the "Display" tab.
- You can add internet support by enabling the BSDsocket.library emulation at the "Misc" tab.
- You can add CD support at WinUAE's "Hard Drives" tab.
Within the following sections I will give pointers to locations where good freely available Amiga software can be found. I will also include brief descriptions and emulation tips if necessary. Note however that there are also still many good commercial software titles available at Amiga dealers around the world.
- Setup your Emulation Box
- Creating an advanced emulated AmigaOS environment
- Acquiring legally free software for AmigaOS
- 10 freely distributable Amiga software titles
- 10 of the best Amiga PD Scene games
- 10 ex-commercial Amiga games
- MikeB
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