PRODUCT NAME Amiga Forever 4.0 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Amiga Emulation software for PC or Mac. COMPANY INFORMATION Cloanto Italy http://www.cloanto.com PRICE Amiga Forever 4.0 £39.99 Amiga Forever Upgrade £24.99 I bought my CD for £35 at the Alt-Woa 2001 show. HARDWARE & SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS PC: Pentium, 16MB RAM, Hi/True color, Windows 9x/NT Mac: PowerPC Mac. Unix: Linux, Solaris, BSD etc, 8Mb, 486+, X11 MACHINE USED FOR TESTING PC: AMD 450Mhz, 128MB RAM, 8GB HD, ATI Rage 128 Graphics Card. 17" Monitor Windows 98SE REVIEWER Peter Hutchison pjhutch@blizzard.u-net.com http://www.blizzard.u-net.com DEMO VERSION WinUAE, DOSUae, MacUAE and Fellow are all free to download from http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/ but these will not include any Kickstarts or Workbench images. COPY PROTECTION None SOFTWARE INSTALLATION Software comes on one CD. CD automatically runs with autorun window with options to load software using different configurations, play the MPEG videos and install the software to your harddisk. REVIEW If you liked the Amiga and sold your Amiga or want to see what the fuss is about then this CD will provide everything you need to bring back those memories. Amiga Forever is a compilation by Cloanto of the latest Amiga Emulators around including the popular WinUAE and Fellow emulators. It also includes all Workbench ADF images from version 1.0 to 3.1 and Kickstarts 1.0 and 3.1 licenced from Amiga Inc. Also provided are a full Workbench directory harddisk and Workbench hardfile to start using with the Emulator. So, you can copy the files to your HD and load straight into Workbench w/o having to find disks, make images and then installing them to a hard file. Lots of Amiga programs are included as well such as Personal Paint 7, Directory Opus 5.5, Picasso 96, TurboText, ToolManager, KingCON, AExplorer and other utilities. Installation is very straight forward. I will install from the initial launch menu and will install all three Emulators: Winuae 0.8.8, Fellow 0.3.5 and DOSUAE 0.7.5, and includes the roms, workbench ADFs, the configuration files, and Shared directory with full Workbench and Work with the supplied Amiga programs! You even get a nice launcher to start up your emulator program. I use a PC 450Mhz AMD and ATI 128 Rage card and 17" Monitor. The configurations supplied did not like my monitor and tend to send it to sleep and thus had to shutdown the emulation or reboot. This is probably due to the 'Full Screen' option in Winuae which for some reason I cannot use. Cloato ought to look into way it does this?! DOCUMENTATION Documentation is supplied in text only and HTML although reading some of the text files from the CD do not displat properly on the PC due to the differences of using LF characters used on the Amiga and CRs on the PC. Documentation also comes with the Emulation software although it is not usually straight forward especially for people not used to using Amigas. Documentation covers all platforms and covers installation and trouble shooting some problems, it also covers AmigaOS, the provided Amiga Programs and Windows Tools. Also included is an Interview with Jay Minor and a copy of the Amiga Patent document! Alos, Data Sharing between the Amiga and other platforms is also covered such as MSH, Serial connection and using AExplorer. SUPPORT Support is provided via the documentation supplied, the Cloato Amiga Forever website with a FAQ and via email. Website: http://www.amigaforever.com/ BUGS No major bugs have been found as yet. Any bugs with the Emulation software is down to the Emulator authors and updates are available on the web for more recent versions. GOOD POINTS Amiga Forever includes everything you need to get started with emulation of the Amiga and a bit extra too and has better support than the the free emulation pages you can download from the web which have no roms, no disks and quite poor documentation. BAD POINTS The CD is quite expensive but would cost you a lot more to buy seperately. ROMs are hard to get hold of, disks are difficult to transfer to ADF format without a real Amiga and if you live outside Europe or the US, getting software and support can be very difficult. This CD overcomes these difficulties by supplying everything you need in one place and the documentation is comprehensive and easy to follow. ALTERNATIVES Amiga Forever Online which is a cut down version of the CD which supplies the emulation software and 1.3 and 3.1 ROMs and Workbenches and config files. If you already have the ROMs and Workbench, then download the Emulators from the UAE Home Page will be more suitable for you. CONCLUSION An excellent CD for old Amiga users and new comers to the Amiga scene, which will save you time and money in the long run and get you up running with Amiga Programs and playing games in no time at all!