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It's a sad fact that almost all of us have to endure using PCs at work. It burns me up to think that I could be writing my programs with SAS/C and use a proper debugger rather than using GNU C (primarily because I absolutely hate using Visual C++). I hate having to perform tasks manually that I would otherwise be able to knock up an AMOS or ARexx program to do in five minutes, and I hate having to sit there renaming groups of files one-by-one, extracting a batch of Zip archives and numerous other things that my Amiga does so well.
There's no doubt that it would be great to be able to do all these things from the discomfort of your PC at work and maybe even forget for just a few minutes what a truly dire machine you're using as the Amiga magic begins to peep through the kludges and clumsiness that is quintessential to the "modern" PC. Yet Amiga Forever has always been surrounded by controversy. In Computer 97 at Cologne, Cloanto's Michael Battilana was met with a rather mixed response when demoing the product. However, it seems that the end result was a successful demonstration of what Amiga Forever could do. To be truthful, after seeing Amiga Forever V1.0 (the preview version), I would not have parted with any cash for it. I tried installing it on several machines, but with limited success. If we had managed to do so, we might have reviewed it back then. Now we have Amiga Forever V2.0, and we're glad to say that it installed flawlessly on Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0 machines.
Before I continue, I should point out that the core of Amiga Forever is actually a series of programs that are freely-available, namely UAE and Fellow. However, this review centres primarily on UAE (or rather WinUAE, the 32-bit Windows version) as it is far more complete and offers a much better Amiga emulation if you want to use it for serious stuff rather than chipset-reliant games. I'll often refer to "Amiga Forever", but I'll be talking about WinUAE. Bear in mind that although WinUAE is freeware, the maintainer, Brian King, would appreciate any contributions that you can offer.
The question you're bound to ask is "but why would you pay good money for something that is more-or-less downloadable from the Internet ?". It's simple. You cut out all the messing about. If you were to download the files from the Internet, you'd spend ages getting them on your PC, and then you'd have to start ferrying discs back and forth between your Amiga and the PC to get ROM images, copies of Workbench and so on. With the CD, it's all here. You get ROM images for Kickstarts between (and including) 1.0 and 3.0, and Workbenches to match. You also get the infinitely useful PPaint 7.1 which is always a welcome addition to anyone's Workbench (apart from the rather naff speed penalties associated with using it on anything other than the Amiga's chipset). Part of the package is "Amiga Explorer", a networking solution distributed only with the Amiga Forever package that allows you to share files and manipulate floppies on your Amiga via a PC. However, regrettably, I didn't get the chance to try this out. There is also a sampled interview with Jay Miner, along with several scans of the Amiga patents. Interesting stuff, but it's not like you'll be coming back to the interview and scans time and time again even if you can't get them anywhere else. Another very good reason for shelling out for Amiga Forever is that you're also supporting one of the Amiga market's most dedicated companies. They paid good money to licence the Amiga OS for this CD. Remember that.
The package presently comes in a double CD case with a CD and a floppy (this is due to change with the next release) with the documentation being totally on-line in HTML format. There's not much to explain as it's all fairly straightforward. However, I wouldn't say that it's particularly well-structured. I certainly wasn't overly impressed with it, but then I've always been very picky when it comes to on-line documentation.
As far as the actual emulation goes, the best processor you can get out of the program is a 68020 (with FPU), which despite not sounding particularly exciting, is still more than usable for everything that I want to do. However, it appears that the people behind UAE aren't content with leaving it at that. They are working on a system which will work in the same way as Amiga PowerPC software does. I'm not sure how it works, but the bottom line is that x86 code can be used directly within "Amiga" programs so that you don't have the overhead of interpreting 680x0 instructions to deal with. I'd be very intrigued to see the results, but to be honest, for the things that I use my machine at work for, there isn't anything particularly processor intensive that I'd need it for.
Be in no doubt, there is simply no competition between Amiga Forever, and the real thing (especially when it comes to things that make heavy use of the custom chips). Even on the machine I have at work, LSD: Jesus On Es and Spaceballs: State of the Art run at an unbelievably slow rate. This is on a 300MHz Pentium II. This alone says an awful lot about the Amiga's hardware if, even with a processor that is (at least on paper) over forty times the speed of an A500 that a PC can still run like a dog in comparison. Then again, if I want to see demos, I can see them on the real thing at home. Fortunately for the sake of sanity, the performance of the emulation in Workbench is much more respectable. The reason why Amiga Forever is so different (and usable) is because it supports Picasso 96 by mapping the Windows display system onto a special "uaegfx" driver available to all applications that use Workbench and support the display database correctly. It's impressive. The net result is that you get a pretty nippy set of screen redraws at proper graphics card resolutions.
Amiga Forever, or rather WinUAE, requires DirectX in order to work at all. In Windows 95 and 98, this is an extra piece of software, which is thoughtfully included on the CD. Windows NT has this built-in, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. This implementation of DirectX is flawed and can't be upgraded like that of Windows 95. You're effectively stuck with it. It's a bit of a pain in the arse because Amiga Forever doesn't like screen switches in the versions of Windows NT (or 98 for that matter, but then again, 98 has a whole host of other bugs for you to worry about) that I tried it on. In fact, the screen goes totally blank and you have to manually refresh the screen either by moving the mouse over every inch of the screen, or moving windows all over the place. Not very nice. However, this only seems to have affected the machines I used. I'm reliably informed that it doesn't necessarily exhibit this annoying problem on other machines with similar specs. It's just more evidence of how flaky the Windows/PC architecture is in general. It is still possible to use the Amiga Forever CD without the DirectX software, as another one of the included emulators, DOSUAE, can also run under Windows. According to Michael Battilana, DOSUAE is even regarded by some people as being a better implementation than WinUAE and also runs under Windows, without requiring DirectX. However, I haven't played with DOSUAE that much primarily as it's interface was a bit clunky and that when I first installed the CD, I had an NT-based machine at work and so DOS applications generally behave very badly with it. However, when I tried it on a 98-based machine, the performance was comparable to the Windows version, and in a round about way it also exhibited the corrupted screen problem on screen switches, but this isn't unusual on DOS programs.
File handling on Amiga Forever is extremely logical. Although you can opt for using discfiles, because 32-bit versions of Windows have hacked in support for proper filenames (albeit with Micro$oft's typical over-the-top attitude to adding features to the point of making them a waste of space) you can actually nominate drives or directories on your hard drive as Amiga volumes (and you can have as many as you like). With appropriate software on your Amiga to read and write Windows 95 discs, you can happily copy things directly to directories on your hard drive irrespective of whether or not Amiga Forever is running. The Workbench "partition" that Amiga Forever boots from is just a directory containing all the relevant Workbench files. You don't have any of the problems of them being painfully slow, or of filling up them up that you'd have if they were disc files. Using Samba (the Windows/UNIX networking protocol), I can actually mount my UNIX home directory, and with some minimal tweaking the disks from AmigaSoc's very own B2000. It's all very useful, but when TCP support arrives, you can take it a step further by opening FTP sites inside Directory Opus listers and having them sitting on your Workbench as well. I do a lot of FTPing at work, and I've not come across an FTP program that I could say was stable and usable enough to consider worthwhile.
As far as compatibility goes, I'm really quite impressed. I've managed to get a variety of applications working correctly. I've also managed to get ShapeShifter and Fusion to work with it. However, they did play up quite a bit and I had a great deal of difficulty getting them to run in anything other than a Workbench window. I'm sure with a little more experimentation, I could get some good results. I had to resort to using disc files (which are actually quite quick when used with the fast EIDE drives on PCs). However, a uaescsi.device driver is being developed that will allow you to use your PC SCSI card and devices in conjunction with the emulated Amiga, and therefore whatever emulator is capable of using SCSI. Directory Opus Magellan works beautifully, especially when you can use it to do things that are totally impossible with Windows (eg. an easy way to rename a batch of files), or would require various shell scripts under UNIX. Opus has become a valuable friend on my Amiga, and it's an essential install on both a real and emulated Amiga. Sadly, despite my best efforts, DrawStudio just wouldn't play ball with Amiga Forever. I really don't know if it was because it was a problem with DrawStudio not being compatible with certain Picasso 96 drivers, or whether it was simply a problem with the uaegfx driver itself. Either way, it is a great loss not being able to use it on my machine at work. Corel Draw sucks. Other graphics programs worked fine. ImageFX 2.6 and ImageStudio worked without any problems at all.
There's only one thing missing from this version. TCP/IP support (although it will be released very soon now). I must say that I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for this to arrive because I'm absolutely desperate to use a decent E-Mail package (ie. YAM). Don't get me started on Outlook Express! Stay tuned though, because TCP/IP support is just around the corner and beta versions are available right now (not that I could get them to work). Ideally, some form of SANA-II compliant driver that lets you utilise the ethernet card inside a PC with something like Fusion would be beyond fantastic. Apart from this, the only real gripe I have is that on Windows NT 4 and 98, the present version of Amiga Forever is simply unusable on the NT machine I tried it on (because of the disappearing display problem). Due to the unstable and inconsistent nature of Windows, I'm unsure what proportion of NT and 98 installs it affects, given that two of my work machines had this problem, and a friend's work machine didn't. Michael Battilana also has had no problems with it on NT4, although he did recommend using a Matrox Millenium graphics card and DirectX combination. My installs of NT and 98 are pretty clean, and so I'd have expected it to be OK. It doesn't seem to be a problem on Windows 95, though (although I haven't used it that much with that version). For the record, the two machines I tried long term tests of the software on were a 300 MHz Gateway with an STB Velocity 128 graphics board running NT 4.0 and a 350 MHz Dell with an ATI RAGE Pro Turbo board running 98.
If you think that this product is bad for the Amiga, then you'd be very much mistaken. I'd find it inconceivable that anyone would consider the emulation perfect enough to ditch their Amiga totally and buy a PC. As someone who has no (or at least minimal) access to Amigas at work, I personally consider it a godsend. In short, Amiga Forever is more or less a dream come true. It's the only way I can turn an unusable, slow and resource hungry 350 Mhz Pentium II into something worthwhile. There are so many things that would take me seconds with Opus Magellan that end up taking an age because I have to do them manually under Windows. No more. Unfortunately, I still have to resort to using Windows for dealing with nasty Micro$oft Word, Excel and Access files that I get given periodically, and also for Timbuktu when I need to administer NT machines remotely, but once Amiga Forever can emulate an Amiga in it's entirety, I won't regret not seeing Windows each day, that's for sure.
If you want to run your Amiga software on your PC at work, university (or, if you've been brainwashed into buying your own, at home), then look no further than Amiga Forever. Although it does contain software that is freely available elsewhere, it also contains a licensed copy of the Amiga's Operating System, and it's the only way you'll get it legitimately. Cloanto have spent a lot of money on getting this licence, and you'll be supporting them if you buy this package rather than pinch a ROM image from somewhere else... oh, and you'll also get a free copy of Personal Paint 7.1 thrown in to the bargain. What more can you ask for ?
Andrew Elia