Amiga Forever by Cloanto
   
   
 

Amiga Emulation and OS

    
The Amiga environments as included in Amiga Forever consist of different components:

The Amiga emulation and OS components implement Amiga technologies which have been licensed by the Amiga companies for use in Amiga Forever.

Speaking of "emulation", it is sometimes believed that the Amiga OS itself is emulated. This is not the case in Amiga Forever, which includes different versions of the original Amiga OS. On top of this, Amiga Forever includes a multitude of preinstalled application software components.

The Amiga OS consists of a set of original ROM and OS files which run on emulated Amiga hardware. Amiga Forever uses primarily two hardware emulation engines: UAE and Fellow. The Amiga OS files included on Amiga Forever are compatible with various ports of UAE and Fellow, most of which are included on Amiga Forever itself.

It is only the combination of full hardware emulation (including emulation of Amiga custom chips, i.e. unlike other projects such as Amithlon) and original Amiga OS (unlike an "emulation" like the AROS project) that makes it possible to achieve maximum compatibility with thousands of existing Classic Amiga software applications. Because the emulation software includes the option to adjust the functionality of the emulated CPU (e.g. 68000, 68020, etc.) and custom chips (e.g. OCS, ECS, AGA), compatibility with older programs is often higher than what would be possible with a "real" Amiga.

The emulation-related files are stored in the Emulation directory of the Amiga Forever installation. The "Emulation/shared" directory contains all files which are shared by the different emulators, including Amiga ROMs, system disks and hard drive partitions.

For additional information on the structure of emulation content on the Amiga Forever distribution medium and installation directory, please refer to this article:

  • 5-101 - Emulation and OS Directory Structure and File Names