Starting over after 23 years

I have Amiga Forever Plus, its like learning to walk again, maybe I was too spontanious yearning for nostalgia not knowing what to expect. I would have thought that by now things would have been a lot simpler for me with an Amiga emulator at my ripe old age of 61. Can anyone point me in the direction of some up to date 2012 dummys guides/vids/tutorials. I see many online, but they are going back to the dinosaur age type UAEs. Amikit and Amisys just fry my brain cells.

[trydowave]

I was going to ask the exact same question Ashton. I was an Amiga owner back in the day and owned an A500, A600 and CD32. I used Workbench 1.3 and 2.04 respectively. (I say used. All I ever seemed to be able to do was mess around with Deluxe Paint II and that SAY program).
The Amiga OS baffled me then and it does now. Amiga kit and Amigasys look great and I really want to get into them but user friendly they are not. Same goes for Aros. If anyone out there can supply a link to a tutorial be it video or text explaining how the file system o'd be eternally grateful. I've been trying to change the wallpaper for about an hour! When I run a game I can’t find the key to escape. The list goes on.

[Arnie]

Hi AshtonPete,

There is a help section for AF Plus. Start AF and press F1.

@Trydowave

Not all games have an esc key, especially disk based games. Try using WHDLoad (HD installed games), they all have an esc key.

@both

WinUAE, is by far, the best all round, easy on the beginner with quickstart modes. Does require the kickstart roms ,which you already have with AF Plus, Ashton.

Any specific questions can be asked here and I'm sure someone will be able to answer them.

Arnie.

[trydowave]

Arnie... any guides out there for Amigakit and Amigasys. I hear its a variant of OS3.9. If so how (and why) are they different. Is navigation around the OS more or less the same (like in XP and Win7 for instance). I'm having trouble doing almost anything in it.

P.s. I do prefer Winuae

[Arnie]

If you mean 'AmiKit' then I'm struggling to get it to install on AF myself. There is a standalone version which I am installing though.

EDIT: AmiKit has finished installing and first impressions are good. It looks like a cross between Window and Aros. I'll play with it some more and see if I can get to grips with it.

I have AF2012plus and had no trouble installing AmiKit on it, but after a few "issues" I liked AmiKit better when I installed it in stand-alone mode.

Although I used an Amiga 500 a lot in the 80's, I find operating the Amiga OS now like being in the dinosaur age, it takes forever to accomplish seemingly simple things.

Back then it didn't seem to matter when I was young but now I'm in my mid 60's I'm finding I can't be bothered spending so much time to do simple things

I hate to say it but Windows is so much easier to navigate around

I still love most things about the Amiga, but user friendly is not exactly how I'd describe it.

Maybe it's an "age" thing eh ?

[Arnie]

More like a personal choice thing. With every OS, Windows included, you will always add programs that make life easier. Dopus is a great program for the Amiga, simplifies a lot of tasks.

If the Amiga was still being developed, like Windows, then I'm sure things would be easier.

Doing things the Amiga way is what makes the Amiga great.

Originally Posted by Arnie

Dopus is a great program for the Amiga, simplifies a lot of tasks.

Yes, Dopus is great alright, I like it so much I bought Dopus10 for Windows

[shovel]

MODS! I know this is an old post but why is it posting under the title of "Saving games in AF UAE?" I was looking for posts that referenced Save games and I was caught with the dangling carrot

[DH]

Probably because the original poster created the thread with the title 'Saving games in AF UAE?', but then decided to changed it in post #1 to a more appropriate title, with the hope the actual thread title would change too, but it doesn't, it only changes the post title and not the thread title, this has to be done by a GM/mod, and as the OP didn't make the request, no one knew about it.

Anyway, it's now been changed

It's funny, hacking around on winuae / amiga forever/fsuae on the mac and so on, I find I have a few reactions.

* AmigaDos 2.04 sure is simple and apparent!
* AmigaShell still seems a lot more intuitive /easy to me than Unix, despite being a Unix developer for around 12 years now. (I can get a lot more done in unix though, it's more powerful)
* My expectations for system documentation are now much much higher than back then; and the availability has gone down of course
* Performing filesystem manipulations and installing things seems so much simpler to me than on modern Windows. However, the ease of use of app stores, Linux packaging systems etc is certainly a cut above.

WinUAE however is pretty daunting in its configuration UI, and Amiga Forever is a bit better but seems to assume you'd never want to save the state/scores/etc. FS UAE has an interesting concept of always saving but with overlay files, which seems good until you rename your configurations or use two configs for one game. Then it gets VERY confusing.