Cloanto released today version 6.0 of Amiga Forever, the Classic Amiga emulation, OS, connectivity and support suite officially licensed by the Amiga companies. Amiga Forever is available in a downloadable Online Edition and in a CD Edition which includes premium content of historical interest (all Amiga OS versions, gallery, videos, games) and KX Light.All versions of Amiga Forever include Amiga OS 1.3 and 3.X files and make it possible to run Classic Amiga software (including hundreds of legally downloadable games) on any PC, with special support for the Windows platform, but also compatible with Mac OS X and GNU/Linux systems.
Our Take: I installed Amiga Forever 6 a few hours ago on my aging dual Celeron 533/256 MB RAM with Windows XP PRO machine and it ran surprisingly fast. Setup is a no brainer, internet connectivity is transparent however some application stability could be a bit better. For those who were too young when Amiga was in its heyday this all-in-one package offers an easy way to taste what the whole fuss about Amiga is all about.
since I can find no way to attach my digital Arcade Joystik to my pc, games don’t really work for me.
Anybody hacked an original Amiga joystick so that it could be used with a pc, or found a digital joystick for the pc.
… but didn’t you link to it already three days ago? It was this news http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6708, that got me buying AF6.0 and I really like it. I downloaded some games and they run fine. I will try the classic “Defender of the Crown” this weekend. Ah, my first Amiga experience. I had a Commodore 128 in those days, most of my friends had a C64, and only one had an Amiga 1000. What an expensive machine (ok, cheap compared to Macs or PCs in the 80s, but a 64 or 128 was a lot cheaper). I didn’t understand then, what this fuss was about graphical interfaces. I tried GEOS on my 128, but find it clunky compared to the command line. Maybe that’s why I’m a UNIX geek now 🙂
Actually the press release only got live yesterday AFAIK.
I heard it is possible to connect Amiga joysticks to the PC via the four player adapters for the parallel port. The four player adapter then offers two Amiga joystick ports 🙂
I’ve got a little grey box that allows one to connect a digital joystick to the joystick port on a soundcard. They were for sale ages ago, when the PC started to get games, and everyone had C64’s and Amiga’s.
I never opened it up, but it should be relatively easy to make.
An analog joystick just uses variable resistors, so make a switch that has 0% resistance when the joystick is to the left,
50% when neutral, and 100% when to the right, and include a pot-meter to level it.
Same for the vertical.
Nothing beats an Arcade2000 to play games on Vice. (Or on the Amiga, which I don’t need to emulate :-))
You can connect traditional joysticks with a Catweasel card. This also supports reading and writing Amiga and other floppies, and can hold a SID chip for playing retro music.
Expensive but interesting. The Mark 3 is sold out and a Mark 4 is coming soon.
http://www.jschoenfeld.de
here is an adapter: http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~stahl/com/index_uk.html
or if you want to build it yourself here is the curcuit:
http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~stahl/com/dualcircuit.gif
I paid for the download edition, thinking it was download edition of the CD. wrong. It’s almost nothing. Just the emulator and roms basically. Now I have to pay another $39 for the CD. Crap. I guess I should have spent 20 minutes reading.
@ GregC
I would go back and read some more…
Since you purchased the “Downloadable” edition, I think you’ll find that you are entitled to the CD edition for an upgrade price.
I’d contact Cloanto before making another mistake..
You can get an Atari/Commodore USB adapter from retrozone at:
http://www.sealiecomputing.com/retrozone/
I bought the NES, SNES, Sega, Atari/Commodore controllers/interfaces and they work great! Also Windows XP and Linux handle them as Human Interface Devices (HID) so no drivers are necessary.