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New Commercial Amiga 500 Game Released
Mike Bouma writes: Pixelglass, known for their "Giana Sisters SE" game, has released a worthy new game for the Amiga 500, called "Worthy." Here's a description of this cute action puzzler: "Assume the role of a fearless boy and collect the required number of diamonds in each stage in order to win the girl's heart! Travel from maze to maze, kill the baddies, avoid the traps, collect beers (your necessary 'fuel' to keep you going), find the diamonds, prove to her you're WORTHY!" Time to dust off that classic Amiga or alternatively download a digital copy and use an UAE emulator for your platform of choice. Have a look at the release trailer.
Chip RAM and Fast RAM. (Chip RAM is more flexible and accessible by the custom chips for audio/video; Fast RAM is only accessible by the CPU. Fast RAM is faster (because the CPU is never held up by the custom chips.)
While Chip RAM is a necessity, Fast RAM isn't. A normal Amiga 500 will have 512kB of Chip RAM.
Trust me, compared to the wonderful world of EMM386.EXE with Conventional, Expanded, Extended and Himem, Amiga memory management is not tricky.
And, yeah, BIOS is a PC term. ROM is the generic term, and on an Amiga, it's called Kickstart. Workbench 1.3 runs with Kickstart 1.3. Workbench 2 with Kickstart 2. In fact, in reality, the "OS" is mostly stored in Kickstart (ROM). (Classic example, the program that runs the entire user interface shell (explorer.exe in Windows terms) is a mere 6 KB. No, it's not some literally incredible compression and hand coded assembly feat -- it actually just kicks off code that's stored in ROM.)
What that boils down to is the Kickstart and Workbench boot disks should match. And, as for 'virtual hard disks', On the Amiga 500, often home computers of this era didn't have hard disks (stupidly expensive things at the time, especially as they were SCSI based) so it was far more normal to boot from floppy disk. Later on, with Amiga 1200s, IDE disks became available and booting/running from HDD became far more normal.
Basically; you're used to modern PCs where the ROM is only the very basics and the OS is generally loaded off disk; whereas most other computers of that era (especially Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64) are more load from ROM based. (Although frequently they did need a disk to boot from, that disk didn't have anywhere near the entire operating system.) These preconceptions probably didn't help you!
Yes, Macintoshes worked the same. It wasn't till much later that MacOS was mainly loaded off disk.
(And, no, Wikipedia is wrong, kickstart is not just the boot firmware. It's more than that. After all, it contains Exec, which is the real kernel of the Amiga operating system. Of course, it was common for Amiga games to ignore the operating system and interact directly with hardware - frequently, a reset / reboot was the only way to exit a game!)
I think blaming the Amiga for problems setting up an emulator is a little unfair. There are several versions of the Amiga, and each came with a ROM and the correct disks for that ROM. If you bought an operating system upgrade, you'd get the right ROM and right disks with it. Additionally, the disks for older operating systems generally worked with newer ROMs.. There was nothing difficult about it. The term "BIOS" is inappropriate, the ROM contained the core operating system, not merely the bootloader and I/O library a BIOS contains.
One other thing to note is that people running games generally didn't run the disk part of the operating system. The game would run directly from the disk, the computer booting right into it.
RAM... it wasn't hard for actual users in practice and there weren't "more classifications of RAM than DOS did". DOS had various types of memory which literally could not be interchanged - applications that used "extended" etc RAM had to use it. For the most part, with the exception of one type of usage, both (or all three, if you count low address space non-chip RAM) types of RAM were interchangeable. The "exception"? Chip RAM had to be used for anything that involved graphics or audio. And that was it.
Ultimately though it sounds like either your emulator didn't have built-in profiles supporting the stock Amigas, or did but you choose to tweak them in the same way a novice might start tweaking hardware settings in a PC emulator. If the former:
Amiga 500: Kickstart 1.3 + 512k chip RAM + OCS
Amiga 500+: Kickstart 2.04 + 1Mb chip + ECS
Amiga 1200: Kickstart 3 + 2Mb chip + AGA
If you want to run games, that's enough. You don't need anything else. If you want to use it as a serious machine, you'll ideally need the same version of the disk part of AmigaOS as your ROM.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There will be no constant swapping. Multidisk games for the Amiga were pretty much uniformly very smart about that. And swapping disks in the emulator is a keypress away, it's really smooth and simple.
Patching will not require a hard disk install; usually installing to hard disk on the Amiga means copying the files over. There is no registry, not even any ini files, just a directory with files. You can patch those files and put them on the disks again, or even patch on the disks.
It's very far from a typical step. It's almost completely unheard of. And it is very amusing you complain about "emulate the AmigaOS API" since games do not use AmigaOS. They go directly on the hardware.
The only reason you had to "faff with it" was because you decided to do you. Seriously, don't blame the Amiga for something the Amiga makes dead simple, and the amulator makes dead simple, but which you decided to make difficult.
Running Amiga games on an Amiga emulator makes DOSbox seem complicated. What you did was the equivalent of installing Windows 3.1 on DOSbox to be able to run a pure DOS game.