Newbie help

[1980-20..]

Yeah i hadnt considered emulation for the amiga only had internet access at home for a couple of months so im a bit behind the times. Ive been using spectrum emulator at mo but other than that im not realy up to speed with emulation and the legality of it an all that. My knowledge is very out of date im afraid. I played some games on mame many years ago and at the time roms were considered breach of copyright an all that and i remember commodore having a site where you could pay to download c64 games but thats as fer as my knowledge goes im afraid.

[Harrison]

There is still a bit of muddy water considering roms. However emulators themselves were deemed legally OK a while back after some court cases, so that isn't an issue. In the UK and most european countries at least.

As for roms, it is a bit harder. Many games and applications are now very old, and many of the original publishers and developers no longer exist, so tracking down who still owns the copyright is very hard. Many that can still be traced happily state their software can be offered for download and used for free home use and they are happy for this to take place. Of the people I've contacted I've not yet had any negative replies, with Revolution software allowing Classicamiga to host downloads of their two Amiga games, and even Future Publishing said they were OK with us scanning in their old Amiga magazine publications and making them into PDFs for download from the site. So it is generally all good.

A french site called planetemu.net is a great place to visit to find and download games in the emulator format ADF. You can even comvert these disk images back into real Amiga disks on an A1200 easily by copying the adf files to the Amiga and then using a program such as ADFBlitzer to convert and write is back to the disk.

The Amiga emulator WinUAE can be found at http:www.winuae.net and is well worth playing around with. You will however need a copy of the Amiga kickstart roms as a file to make the emulator work, and these are the only part of the Amiga that is still copyrighted and illegal to share online. However I will PM you with some info to help you with this part.