Can I play Amiga games on my PC/Mac?
From Classicamiga
Yes you can. This is achieved by using something called an Amiga Emulator.
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What is an Emulator?
An emulator is a software application which is coded to emulate the hardware originally in the Amiga and this emulator is used to run the software originally written for the Amiga by tricking the Amiga software into thinking it is running on a real Amiga.
What emulator do I need to emulate the Amiga?
This will depend on the computer you want to emulate the Amiga on. Amiga emulators exist for most platforms including Windows PC, Linux, Mac OS, Amiga OS and many more.
To see a full list of the available emulators for your computer please look in the Emulation section.
Do I need anything other than the Amiga emulator?
Yes you do. You will need two additional things. An Amiga Kickstart rom file, and some Amiga Software.
Kickstart rom
An Amiga emulator will not work without a file copy of something called the Amiga Kickstart Rom. This Rom file is still under copyright so cannot be provided with any emulator downloads. You will need to source this kickstart rom file separately before you can run any Amiga emulators.
See Kickstart Roms Explained for more information about the Kickstart rom.
Amiga Software
Originally Amiga software was supplied on 3.5" Floppy disks. These were formatted with an Amiga specific File Structure that is unique to the Amiga and cannot be read or written to by any other computer system. On a real Amiga you would load a game or program by placing the floppy disk into the Amiga's floppy disk drive and switching the Amiga on.
However due to this Amiga specific file structure that Amiga floppy disks are formatted in, Amiga disks cannot be read or written in your PC, Mac etc... So it is not possible to use an original Amiga game disk with an emulator to load a game or application. Instead you need to use something called an ADF. This is a file which is normally always 880KB in size and is an exact copy (image) of an original Amiga floppy disk.
To load games and other software into an Amiga emulator you need to obtain a copy of the game/software disk as an ADF image file. There are many places online you can find Amiga ADF disk image files. We suggest you try http://www.planetemu.net as a good starting place.
OK, I have everything. How do I load a game?
Once you have downloaded the Amiga emulator for your computer, obtained a kickstart rom image, and have some Amiga software in ADF format, this is all you will need to load and run games and other software that was originally written for the Amiga.
Most Amiga emulators can be installed onto your PC (or other system) much like any other Application. Follow the installation instructions included with your emulator. Also look in our Emulation section as we will be including setup guides for the most popular Amiga emulators.
Once you have the emulator installed, when you run it you will normally have to tell the emulator where the kickstart rom file is located. This is different for each emulator so follow the emulators own instructions, or again look in our emulation section for more information.
References
- Harrison's brain!
