Recently, I’ve been attempting to get Amiga emulation running. The Amiga’s have always seemed pretty cool and had a lot of neat features. The look-and-feel has always seemed better than Windows (and Mac OS in some ways). Unfortunately, the information provided with AmiKit is insufficient for installation using Amiga Forever 2009. Here are some hints and tips that I’ve figured out as I scratched my head trying to figure out why things couldn’t work properly. A main reason is that AmiKit is seems primarily developed for Windows and Linux is an after thought. I can’t afford a real Amiga right now and just happen to have Amiga Forever 2009 from my birthday last year (thanks Jessica!!!).

(YMMV as always. I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 on a MacBook 6,1. However, a lot of the below information is probably applicable to other Ubuntu flavors and versions as that is the way of things.)

If, like me, you’re running Ubuntu (or other Debian-based distro), you can just forget about using the AmiKit installer. Xdialog is required but has been deprecated under Ubuntu 10.04. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t work with newer versions anyway. Self-extracting Linux installation utilities seem to have about a 25%-75% success ratio; if it’s specifically written for your version of Linux, it might be as high as 50%-50%, but there’s only a 25% chance of that 🙂

Anyway, first use the package management facility to install E-UAE. I found out tonight there are a bunch of hidden options in E-UAE that are configurable through ~/.uaerc. Imagine that. However, overall, UAE and E-UAE are phenomenal and I’m glad to see someone supports the system as much as they do.

Now, create a folder in your home directory (or other accessible location) and copy all the files from the AmigaForever CD into it. I created ~/Emulation/Amiga/AmigaForever. Ignore the directive about the -Rav switch for copying… you can just drag all the files from the root folder of the CD into your chosen directory. When complete, make sure everything is set writable for you (you can go to ~/Emulation/Amiga/AmigaForever and issue chmod +w -R * as this will add the writable attribute for the owner to all folders). Next, from this directory, create a symbolic link from Amiga Files to Emulation (ln -s Amiga Files Emulation). Make sure the backslash () is there or the command will do some funny things. Now, move into the Emulation folder and create a symlink from Shared to System (ln -s Shared System). All of this paragraph is necessary because the folder structure appears to be hard-coded into AmiKit’s installation process and the Amiga Forever 2009 structure doesn’t match.

Next, follow the remaining steps shown in the Linux setup guide provided by AmiKit. Basically, the parts you want to follow are the ones that discuss how to “build” your virtual machine: CPU, memory, rom locations, etc. Just the above steps are necessary to prep everything. If you don’t perform the above, you will receive a message of “Unknown Command” after the 2 commands the installer tries to execute, followed by a message of “Not Found.” Apparently, there aren’t that many people running under Linux on their own box as I found very little complete information to help troubleshoot this problem.

If anyone has any additional input, please let me know. Hopefully, this will help you get past the worst of the installation process. Now, off to play!