The Amiga computer is a desktop machine which first appeared in the eighties, produced by Commodore Business Machines. It was, and still is, noted for it's multi-tasking and graphics abilities. Due to mismanagement by Commodore, Amiga production stopped for about three years in the early nineties. The Amiga was continued by Amiga Technologies and is now owned by Gateway2000, in the guise of Amiga International.

The Amiga was a revolutionary 16 bit computer created by an American electronic firm called Commodore inc as it could record and play back any real audio. When it first came out in 1986, the Amiga 1000 had outstanding audio and video capacities. Several million machines were sold throughout the years until the last Amiga came out in the late 90's (the A4000 Tower). Nowadays some manufacturers have developed new generation Amiga computers going by the name of Pegasos and Amiga One.

The Amiga scene is a European computer art movement that saw the light in the mid 80's (1986 to be more exact). It consists in thousands of young people that share a common interest in programming, creating graphics, doing music and swapping. All those persons use pseudonyms and gather in groups (from 5 to 50 persons) in order to release demonstrations (programs) that are often presented at computer parties across Europe.

The Amiga stores part of the OS in a ROM and the rest on hard disk. You need to transfer both of these parts to the emulator in order to run software that uses the OS. The component held in ROM is known as Kickstart. The rest of the OS is provided on floppy disks with the Amiga, or perhaps already installed on a HD if you bought a second-hand one. Both UAE and Fellow provide the same utilities to copy the OS from an Amiga to floppy disks. The programmes provided are transdisk and transrom.

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Why would you want to? (Only joking!) The program you need is CrossMac. I have this program but have never used it so can't tell you much about it. It should work in the same way as CrossDos (see below).

The program you need is CrossDos. If you don't own an Amiga 4000 or a high density drive then you can only read 720k disks (which hold a maximum of 730,100 bytes). Versions 6 and below could not support long filenames and seemed to capitalise them all (ugly!). Version 7 corrected this and is the best way to transfer (smallish) Amiga and PC data!

No, because there isn't really any serious demand for Amiga game development anymore. Don't get me wrong: I love the Amiga and always will, but I need to live and earn money to do so.

I suggest that you start by checking the trading post-type papers in your area. On the net, you can try the following newsgroups:

This is where things start to come undone. You can either transfer them from the emulation platform somehow or download them separately from somewhere else, directly to your Amiga.

And now things can get decidedly sticky. The answer depends on the platform and the facilities you have available. There are a range of options: This is not possible on most platforms due to the fact that Amiga floppy drives contain custom hardware. This means that the drive can not be emulated in software.

but there are many others. A simple web search will return enough hits to keep you busy for weeks. Ralf Steines has developed a very nice on-line search engine that allows you to search web and ftp sites, Aminet and more: The Nth Dimension contains stacks of cover disks from the big Amiga magazines, now gone. Bucket-loads of software:

Ralf has also developed a very nice on-line search engine for all things Amiga which contains news groups, Amiga web directories and more: A superb, detailed reference to AmigaDOS commands, Workbench utilites, ARexx, error messages and all aspects of Workbench usage and layout.

a matter of fact Monty, Curt Cool and Asle are real Amiga composers. Crown has been collecting modules since 1990 and has tried to compose Amiga modules but his real good friends begged him to stop.

You might have heard of Amiga emulators such as UAE (WinUAE, WinFellow, etc.) that are nowadays available for most platforms. Once you have installed the software and ROMs you can load Sound/Noise/Protracker and start composing. If you didn't know, we can reveal that all the latest Amiga chiptunes from 4-Mat were composed on an emulated Amiga. Ant it works fine, really!

A good friend of us has made an incredible utility, which enables you to read Amiga disk directly on your PC. You can get it straight from AMP's download page. All you need is to install the software and 2 disk drives. That software also works with C64, Atari ST floppies. Make sure to send the author an email and donation for his excellent work.

More seriously the magazine is sent to UK destinations via second class mail, this usually takes two or three days. Overseas copies are sent via Air Mail, the time they take to arrive varies on the location. Some overseas subscribers tell us that their magazine arrives within a day or two, some take longer. In general UK subscribers should allow a week and overseas subscribers two weeks from the posting date before contacting us about a magazine that has not arrived.

After over 8 years working on the magazine Total Amiga's editor, Robert Williams, has decided to step down. No one else within SEAL was able to take over the editorship so we explored a number of possible ways to continue Total Amiga, We decided the best solution was to close the magazine and transfer existing subscribers to a new English edition of Amiga Future.

No, Total Amiga is financially stable and has a strong subscriber base. The closure was brought about by the personal decision of the editor.

Amiga Future is a well respected, high quality magazine in many ways similar to Total Amiga and has a track record of producing magazines regularly over a long period. We felt they were the best match for Total Amiga subscribers and we feel confident they will provide a quality English Amiga magazine for years to come. We want there to continue to be a quality English language Amiga magazine available.

You will receive one issue of Amiga Future English edition for each issue that is outstanding on your Total Amiga subscription after issue 26.

The first thing to realise is that Amiga Future is published 6 times a year compared to Total Amiga's 4 times per year, this means that, for UK, European and US subscribers, the per issue cost is only slightly more expensive than Total Amiga. For subscribers in the Rest of the World the subscription cost per issue is cheaper.

With the death of Commodore and the future of the Amiga no longer clear, some groups have decided to move partially or fully to the PC. In recent months the PC demo scene has seen music, graphics, or entire demos by members or former members of CNCD, Oxygene, Bomb, Silents, Scoopex, Byterapers, etc. Nooon has had contributions from some Sanity members (Moby and RA); many members of Pulse are from the Amiga scene as well (DreamDealers). Oxygene is actually ex-Atari and an ex-Amiga group.

present, Qt only works well on X11 and Win32 (Windows 95 and Windows NT). Porting to other platforms is a lower priority. Currently, we concentrate on the Windows and X versions.

To image Atari ST games, you should use the same method as for Amiga disks. And the same goes for Acorn Archimedes Disks. If they are 1.44MB HD floppies, you will need a GENUINE Amiga high density disk drive, NOT a ‘Power XL’ drive or any other clones. For 5.25” floppies, you will need a compatible Amiga 5.25” drive, these are quite rare but do exist. You will need to make sure you have the latest version of the disk imaging software which supports 40 track devices.

The best thing is to download the demo of MakeCD (the latest version) and check out the Compatibility document. This contains all the information you could possibly want to know about Amiga CD writers, which systems to use, which writers, drivers etc. I once borrowed an external CD writer but couldn't get it to work on my 1200 (possibly the power supply couldn't handle the extra load and it just guru'd when plugged in).

No, and yes. No, with a standard PC it's impossible. However, with some additional hardware (i.e. a new floppy controller) it is possible. I currently know of two solutions, the AFR package which consists of a small parallel port interface that you have to build yourself and some software, and the Catweasel controller which is available as an ISA card and comes with DOS software that can create disk files. I have a Catweasel here, and it does in fact work.

The CD mentioned earlier is known as Amiga Forever and is provided by Cloanto. Visit their website at: and follow their instructions to install the OS. The CD also includes UAE, Fellow, Cloanto's file transfer programme Amiga Explorer, Picasso96 (mentioned later) and a swag of other stuff.Every version of the Amiga OS from 1.0 to 3.0 is provided. Although the disc is set up to run on Windows, if you use another OS all of the Amiga OS' and software (almost everything) are still useful.

Compress the .adf with a compressor that you can use on the Amiga. You can do this from within the emulator if you like so that you can use an Amiga compressor directly. Transfer the file to your Amiga using the reverse of the method you use to transfer files from the Amiga to the emulation platform e.g. CrossDOS. Now, working on the Amiga, decompress the .adf to RAM: or somewhere suitable. Use adf2disk to unpack the .adf to a floppy. Copy the unpacked files wherever you wish.

We have all been active in the Amiga scene for quite a while now, some of us as early as 1988. So we won't take as an offence to be called "oldschoolers". If you are interested we can reveal that we have been members of such groups as Cryptoburners, Paradox, Analog, Depth...