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BeOS was designed as a replacement for AmigaOS, really. A-OS->B-OS, hahaha.

Design-wise, it has a lot in common with AmigaOS (only cleaner, without compatibility constraints), and back in the early BeBox days Be aggressively pursued the Amiga market and particularly Amiga developers as Commodore floundered. Among other things, it's why the cygwin-like layer for AmigaOS and BeOS is the same project, GeekGadgets and bebits was obviously modelled on the Aminet

The Apple thing was a much later thing. As the USA is like a black hole of non-Amiga-ness, it's understandable the Amiga link might be missed in this area as so many others (fed up of americans mistaking inferior PC ports of Amiga heyday software for the canonical version, gah...).

Feel free to correct the Wiki article. While you're at it, you might want to get the myriad web sites which disagree with you to fix their pages.

I actually started digging around just last week for a way to get my data off my old Amiga and Commodore 128 disks.

For the Amiga I turned up this gem. It's basically instructions to build a piece of hardware that will plug the Amiga floppy drive's (23-pin?) connector in to a parallel port. If you still have a parallel port.

So like you said, I'd better hope that old floppy drive still works. If it does though, then I can rely on the huge processing power and storage increases since Amiga's heyday to pack off all those old disk images and fire up the emulator.

The interesting conclusion, to me, is that if I'd tried to copy these disks over shortly after retiring that old computer, the hardware interface would be easier but the disk images would have been large and unwieldy compared to hard drives available at the time. And there'd be no way to use the files because there wasn't a fast emulator available.

is there a site with lots of UAE "roms" to download?

Indeed, If it contained Blue Max, Ghostbusters and/or Wonder Boy, I would have bought it. No need for IK+ though, got it on the CD32 :)

Getting nostalgic for your old Amiga?
The "Back to the Roots" software archive offers free legal downloads of many games, demos, pictures, etc.
Amiga Forever is a polished emulator solution with licensed operating system for sale by Cloanto Software, in a download version or a CD version that even can be booted from Knoppix-style.

There is a reason why this is in the developers section: It's ready for people to develop on, but not for general consumer release. But think about how quick the Amiga OS and GUI was running on 7,14 and 50 MHz Motorola 680x0 processors, and extrapolate that to a 800MHz G4. Of course there's more colours and new stuff, but they've kept the efficiency.

Speaking of which, I should get the newest upgrade to OS 4.0 this week. Been busy. PPC native graphics!

I prefer WinUAE for all my Amiga needs. :-)

Works perfectly fine with lots of games and even demos functional to 100%. It's still in development (last update just two months ago) and contains numerous features to extend the OS with, although it still feels and functions probably more like the Amiga you came to know than this "AmigaOS 4.0". You can even choose which ROM to use (which aren't freely available, but sold by the old Amiga software company Cloanto) to make it anything from an Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3 to an Amiga 1200 with AGA and Kickstart 3.0!

Best of all, the emulator itself is free, fast (or emulates the speed an Amiga would have if you wish), and can be run like a regular program on your existing partition where floppy disks are just simple Megabyte-sized image files.

WinUAE is based on UAE which is open source software, with downloadable binaries for Linux.

An OS of interest might be AROS with a goal to be a full-blown AmigaOS 3.x compatible OS. However, I have a feeling you'll have less problems with the emulator.

If you're willing to settle for Scorched Tanks instead of Scorched Earth, try WinUAE. You can get the Scorched Tanks disks almost completely legally from the Back2Roots project.

Agreed.. still the Amiga demos with lot's of 3d is very impressive considering the relative amount of processing power. People like Offa, Rubberduck and Kalms of TBL, Juliet&Case of CNCD, Antibyte of Scoopex etc. really pushed those poor m68k's for every last cycle.

But still, the most enjoyable demos today are those golden oldies like Enigma by Phenomena (Azatoth was my hero), Mental Hangover by Scoopex, Voyage by Razor 1911 and Hardwired by The Silents DK and Crionics.

Oh, the memories :)

Check out Back to the roots for some nice Amiga demoscene nostalgia. Pouet.net is also a nice resource for demoscene information.

If you have the UAE Amiga Emulator, you can find hundreds of legitimately-released games at Back 2 The Roots, enough to keep you entertained for years!

Back2roots.org which does legally downloadable Amiga games, has had this happen to them a couple of times.
A bot scours the web looking for .zips and a list of recognisable names, and automatically fires off an email which makes threats over assumed piracy.

IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association), self appointed world software cops, attacked our site again. Obviously they run a robot, which parses sites for zipfiles with names of games they protect, and, once detected, directly notify the owner of the IP space to disable access without doing any research. That is exactly what happened to us, now the second time. Last time (one year ago) we provided contact details and the information that all stuff on our site is either freely distributable or licensed. They did not even respond. The first answer is the second attack now, mostly because of freeware and demo versions! Fortunately the IT department of the university hostig us are some bright minds. They disabled routing for our machine for a while and asked IDSA to approve their statement in any way, which did not happen, so they enabled our site again. Big thanks for this wise reaction!

If you run a legal download site, please warn your ISP about the way IDSA is doing their work, and that they blindly try to shut down sites, no matter how many years of research you invested in getting licenses to keep your site legal. If you're one of the companies supporting IDSA consider giving your money to someone who takes the subject more seriously.

IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association), self appointed world software cops, attacked our site again. Obviously they run a robot, which parses sites for zipfiles with names of games they protect, and, once detected, directly notify the owner of the IP space to disable access without doing any research. That is exactly what happened to us, now the second time. Last time (one year ago) we provided contact details and the information that all stuff on our site is either freely distributable or licensed. They did not even respond. The first answer is the second attack now, mostly because of freeware and demo versions! Fortunately the IT department of the university hostig us are some bright minds. They disabled routing for our machine for a while and asked IDSA to approve their statement in any way, which did not happen, so they enabled our site again. Big thanks for this wise reaction!

If you run a legal download site, please warn your ISP about the way IDSA is doing their work, and that they blindly try to shut down sites, no matter how many years of research you invested in getting licenses to keep your site legal. If you're one of the companies supporting IDSA consider giving your money to someone who takes the subject more seriously.

There is a similar Amiga (and PC demo) site, Back 2 the Roots. It is a great site with hundreds of Amiga games, demos, music, and PC demos on there for download. The owner of the site has gone to great pains to get permission for every piece of copyright work (i.e. games and music) on there.

The site has been knocked out of action twice by IDSA. The problem is that the IDSA didn't check or anything (both times), they just told the ISP the site was illegal and the ISP complied!

I sent a complaint mail to them about it, but of course, I didn't receive anything back.

The IDSA may have their place, but they are being paid by the industry to do a job that they are obviously not doing properly.

Did none of you have an Amiga?

The Amiga had/has EVERYTHING game-wise, and usually beter than the PC counterparts.

You need a ROM for UAE to work (get one from a real Amiga or pay for Amiga Forever from www.cloanto.com), but if/when you have one you can go to back2roots.org and download tons of stuff.

Mostly commercial games. The website has got permission from all of the relevant software companies to host the games on the site.

Try WinUAE for Windows or UAE for Linux. And for demos Back2Roots is a good source.

I'm not really sure of any documentation of emulation in itself but the following are free and fairly well documented:

Bochs, the IA-32 x86 emulator, intereting because it really is a software PC.Unix Amiga Emulator and Windows Unix Amiga Emulator are both interesting because they are running totally alien machines. Incedently if you can get hold of the required Kickstart ROMS (very easy on Google allegedly), there are huge number of Amiga Games now legally in the public domain. Being a skinflint and an ex-Amiga owner this has saved me having to buy a PC game for a few months now.

Anyway. Good luck.

They have It's called 3DMark.

The group who wrote the classics "Unreal" and "Second Reality" known as the Future Crew, started a little company back in '95 called Remedy. You may have heard of their game, "Max Payne". Well anyway when they first released a benchmarking tool called Final Reality (sounds like Second Reality, eh) it was such a success that Remedy spawned off the Mad Onion. Think of it as commercial demos.

The demoscene will never die. It just keeps changing. To an Amiga cracker/intro/demo coder the scene has been truly dead since the early 90's. Try telling that to the sceners of today.

• GMD ifarchive of new and old interactive games
• Frotz, infocom game player for all machines (including Windows and Linux)
• Nitfol, an even better infocom game player
• About.com guide to IF
• unofficial Infocom page with some freebie Zork downloads
• Most of the Infocom games (Amiga games site, but the data files work on all platforms with Frotz)

Anyone with an Amiga or UAE and a legal set of ROMs can get many classic games.

Get your C64 games, Spectrum games, Amiga games and Atari ST games.

Lazarus are dead, and will stay dead. There are better Amiga sites out there now, like Warlock's ADF vault and Amiga back2roots.