Quote:
Originally Posted by michaelz
This thread is made for the betatesters of Amiga Forever 7 and C64 Forever 7. If needed I'll add more information later. Please keep the discussion to these two applications.
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Thank you, Michael, for spearheading this.
The other day I was discussing why some of us engage in things like coding or arts instead of football and other more "social" activities. While I know what led me into a Commodore/Amiga-branded world when I was about 11 or 12 years old, I did not expect that even today I still seem to seek refuge in creativity, or machine issues, more than in the humans themselves, when faced with some more complex forms of interaction, as emerged in some of the threads here. So, in case you were suspecting this, the answer is yes, my secret hope is that this "beta" discussion may mature into something else
End of digression!
I know there are some WinUAE power users here. Once you install Amiga Forever, here are some tips:
- Scroll to the end of Tools/Options/Emulation, and enable "[x] Launch from menu" and "[x] Write log files" for WinUAE, WinFellow and VICE. That will help testing and sharing debug information.
- Then go the Input tab, which is right after Emulation, click Edit for the shared options, and make sure that "Plugin runtime options" is set to F12 (just press the <F12> key while in the field). Read the warning, because title information is not saved via F12. But, I don't want you to have the feeling that you can't do the things you could do when using WinUAE in standalone mode.
- Under Help/About, make sure that "[x] Include beta versions" is enabled. It is pre-enabled when you install a beta build. If you are not comfortable with the software going online to check for updates, you can disable one or two options right there.
- Explore the title editor. For example, right-click any entry in the Systems list, and select Edit. When you make changes to a title (e.g. configuration or description), the information is stored in the actual title file itself, i.e. in the XML manifest of the
RP9 package. This mechanism is designed for long-term content access and maintenance, without needing a separate database. In the General tab of the editor, click Show Manifest, Show Changes or All Files... to view low-level XML and package details. You are in control!
- Please have a look at the new Input options, both at the general level (under Tools/Options/Input) and at the title level (Edit, then go to the Input tab). These took many months of work, and are extremely powerful. You can use, reconfigure and associate different game controllers, individual buttons, virtual buttons, etc., to Amiga and CBM systems. The abstraction between global "profiles" and title-specific settings was meant to let you describe your personal preferences and devices at a more general level, while keeping titles as portable as possible.
With projects like (Win)UAE, (Win)Fellow, VICE, QEMU and DOSBox, we know that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But I hope that this experience with Amiga Forever and C64 Forever, which may be the first for some of you, may make you appreciate that these packages are not simple "launchers". They are sophisticated authoring and playback environments, trying to blend the passions of our youth with a long-term vision and hopes.
We invested more than half a million lines of code written by Cloanto into this (not counting previous versions, nor open source components, to which we also contribute), and I am grateful to all of you who accepted to explore what has been part of our daily lives for more than 20 years (Amiga Forever 1.0 was in 1997!), and help improve it.
Mike