Ok, I'm hopelessly lost unfortunately

[Danest]

After a week I have to admit I'm not figuring this out myself. Ugh. I've never had trouble figuring out software before, and have used emulators for many other systems. But for amiga forever, I'm absolutely lost. I had to get help here on this board, just to figure out how to quit. But yeah, completely lost.
The only thing I've gotten to work are the pre-installed roms that came with amiga forever, but that's just a simple select and click. Completely lost on what else to do. I loaded up a few desktops (such as amiga 4000) but... well, they didn't actually seem to DO anything.

[fxgogo]

What would you like to do on the Amiga? What is that ‘something’ that drew you to the system in the first place? Let’s go from there. AF is a good starting point, and the prebuilt systems are essentially the same as a real Amiga would have been when you bought one new. We now need to put software on to do something.

[Danest]

Well I want to get back into the old nostalgic games I used to play ... to me my amiga 500 was a game machine. Other than writing college papers, that's what I did with it.
The last game I was playing back in the 90's before it finally broke too much was Space 1889, so I never really played more than the first 5 minutes of it.
The games that came with amiga forever are simple, just click and play, but most of them are unfamiliar to me. They're cool, but I'm here for the nostalgia mostly.
The multi-disk roms appear to be much more complicated to use than just click a file and play.

[Konrad]

The term ROM is not used for games, but for kickstart images. It can be confusing when you use the wrong term. Disk images of games are mostly ADF or IPF.

Judging from your current experience with Amiga emulation:
Boot a preconfigured A500 system. You will be greeted with the hand and disk screen, telling you to insert a disk. From here you'd have to do it like on a real system: virtually insert a disk, which will then be bootet. For multi-disk games you also have to virtually swap disks (i.e. eject and insert next disk).
I think that's the most easy way for you to get started.

Important to know:
Not all multi-disk games support multiple disk drives !
Many games just support ONE, so for those games you always have to use first drive DF0.
But there is also a good number of games which support two disk drives. For those you can put disk1 in DF0 and disk2 in DF1.
Not many games support even more drives (Lucas Arts adventure games for example).
You will have to try by yourself, I don't think there's a list available.



When you get confident with emulation you can go the advanced route:
Emulate an A1200 with HD and use WHDLoad (there are packages available) to play games from harddisk. Faster loading and no disk-swapping required.

[dreadnought]

It's normal that Amiga emulation can be a little bit overwhelming, at least compared to other emus. But in reality it's possible to ignore most of the settings and run stuff with just few basic steps.

I don't know anything about AmigaForever, so this is for FS-UAE emulator:
-download and install it: https://fs-uae.net/download#windows
-start FS-UAE Launcher
-click on the Amiga logo in top left corner, choose Import From Amiga Forever CD
-now point it to your AmigaForever folder which contains Kickstart rom files
-after this you should have a lot of greenlighted Amiga models in Available Kickstart Versions below
-now you can find some Amiga adf (floppy disk) files on the web and just drag and drop them on the FS-UAE shortcut, games will autoboot.
-for multi-disk floppy games you will need to change disks using Floppy Drives in FS-UAE Launcher

Another solution: find a hdf (hard disk) image collection on the web, then mount them using Hard Drive tab in FS-UAE Launcher. Much faster and no disk swapping. WHDLoad is even better but bit more complicated.

And the EASIEST solution: find the "MegaAGS" image on the web. It's a huge hdf which has all the WHDLoads, demos, music and Workbench on it. Theb est thing is you only need to mount it once as Hard Drive, then it has its own game frontend which lets you choose games and they will run without any settings changing or disk swapping.

[chip]

As possible option you can use (for Windows) WinUAE

No difficult to start with it to load demos or games

[dreadnought]

Sure, there is WinUAE, but the reason I wrote about FS-UAE is that it seems to be tad more user-friendly. And for somebody who says they're "hopelessly" lost, it might make a difference

[chip]

Right observation, but IMHO WinUAE can be used with his "default" settings in a very easy way

That's something i do since 2002

Indeed, no reasons for me to change the various parameters of the emulator

At least, this is the kind of use i do of WinUAE

[jono1975]

there is a great series of youtube guides for WinUAE and it really helped me understand the basics
[ Show youtube player ]

[ma693541]

WinUAE An guide about WinUAE in html format with both text and pictures. The guide is written for WinUAE 4.4.0. Latest Public Version.