Amiga Forever
by Michael C. Battilana

Ed. Fleecy Moss, CTO of Amiga Inc. asked Michael C. Battilana to give us a bit of history of Amiga Forever [http://www.amigaforever.com/] and what they are trying to do with it.

Dear Fleecy, this is a difficult question. it feels like "what did you do and what are you trying to do with your life?" :-)

The fact is, the Amiga's history, for many of us who are Amigans since the mid-80s, walks hand in hand with the history of ourselves when we had not just a lot more hair, but also some very special dreams and hopes, which nobody would ever want to give up. The Amiga offered to us, young people full of ideals, and dreams, and passion, not only the illusion of uncompromising excellence, but also the tangible and somewhat subversive proof that life under these conditions is possible. The unique synergy of gifted people and technological events which led to a system that clearly stood out as the best hardware and the best operating system around also attracted a special community and ignited a chain reaction of collective dreams. When we were working with our Amiga 1000s, 2000s and 3000s, we not only were extremely productive with a system of which we knew every operating system file and function, but we enjoyed it too. Now, you gave us an addictive drug, we want more of it, and you ask why? :-)

Intimately, beyond the obvious, I don't know why! Is it because we miss those pre-New Economy years, when technology was less about noise and marketing and more about crafting fine things? Is it because, very simply, we were 10 or 20 years younger? It's a bit of all of this, I guess. Amiga Forever attract users who always wished an Amiga, but could never afford one, but also people who are always trying to learn something new, and people who are too old to keep learning something new, for which the current pace of technological change is a small handicap. To us Amiga users who felt the magic of those years, and suddenly learned to know the fear of failing custom chips with no spare parts, emulation felt like a new lease of life. Each time I use the Amiga emulation on my notebook, it feels like magic. And this occurs every day. Thanks to Amiga Forever, when we had to start working in offices full of PCs we could bring our Amiga projects with us, and impress our co-workers with Amiga. And when we had to work with an Amiga and a PC side by side, all the connectivity software on Amiga Forever felt very useful too.

But, like for the original Amiga, it takes people to make dreams come alive. About 10 years ago, a few of us Amiga users who had experienced excellent Atari and Mac "emulation" (there wasn't really much to emulate) on the Amiga, were beginning to wonder about the possibility of emulating the Amiga hardware and its custom chips on increasingly powerful PCs. I remember, back in April 1994, the same month in which Dave Haynie shot his famous Deathbed Vigil video (now also included on Amiga Forever, courtesy of Dave) right before Commodore in West Chester closed, I was exchanging sad emails with Carolyn and others there, also discussing the possibility of using new CPUs (I, like many Amiga users, was a big PowerPC fan back then) and multitasking operating systems (like OS/2) to build an Amiga emulation. After all, even Apple had already started its successful 68K to PowerPC migration strategy with its Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) emulation software.

So, once again, there was a flow of ideas in the air, and CPUs (which then like now were doubling in power every 18 months) were beginning to approach a realm where even an emulation of the complex Amiga hardware could be within reach. But it took one person, Bernd Schmidt, in Germany, to prove even those who would never have thought an Amiga notebook to be possible, that they were wrong. In March 1995, a black-and-white picture of the Kickstart 1.3 boot screen appeared for the first time on his 90 MHz Pentium system running Linux. The U in UAE did not stand for Unusable any more! While Apple was busy adding dynamic recompilation (similar to today's just-in-time technology) to its MAE system, Bernd was hard at work on the emulation of the Amiga custom chips. In late 1995, UAE 0.2 was finally released to an anxious public of high end PC users.

It didn't take long for smart people to notice the potential of the new Amiga emulation technology. Some former Commodore-Amiga engineers publicly stated that "UAE certainly does violate the Amiga patents". Remember, these were the days where the first emulators for game consoles were appearing and quickly disappearing in the courts. Companies like Apple were fighting unauthorized Mac emulators. The internet was beginning to become a popular medium for Amiga ROM and operating system files to be "exchanged". At some point, Gateway officials said that "something had to be done". Probably, and understandably, they felt that they had to defend their multimillion dollar investment in Amiga intellectual property assets.

During the spring of 1997, when Brian King, who took over from Mathias Ormann the Windows port of UAE, was working at Cloanto in Italy, and while our Amiga sales were forcing us to look for new horizons on the PC, we all got more involved in Amiga-PC coexistence and data sharing needs. For example, my own Amiga 3000, which had been running day and night for seven years, had a broken SCSI chip which I "replaced" with an Oktagon card, and a custom chip was beginning to fail as well. Within the context of a total lack of Amiga-related news and developments, all of this felt very sad. Personal Paint 8 was put on hold, waiting for a new Amiga operating system and hardware architecture. We were beginning to work on boring PC software. :-(

But that Amiga emulation effort, with its mix of challenging legal issues and possible futures, still sounded like an intriguing idea. It was something which we felt strongly about, because it reflected our own passions and needs, as long time Amiga users. Reality demanded that we have Amiga and PC hardware, software and data side by side, and we knew that our Amiga friends and customers also increasingly had this need. I loved UAE, and I had been in touch with Bernd for some time. Also, there were a lot of other contributors involved (the UAE software was not yet GPL), so an agreement was not easy: we would have had to contact every single author of every single line of code. At the same time, a certain pressure from Gateway/Amiga staff and in Usenet groups appeared to be rising. Towards the end of the summer, at the end of an exchange of emails and phone calls with Gateway/Amiga, we decided to meet, to discuss both Personal Paint matters and to explore the possibility of giving Amiga emulation an official blessing. We met in Frankfurt in early September. Petro had never seen a notebook booting an Amiga or playing the bouncing ball demo. But this was not what convinced him. You know, I never told this to anybody, but. Petro's Windows 95 PC (in his office) was not working properly, and he had been waiting all day for a technician. So, after we talked, I offered to have a look at it. I reinstalled Windows, and fixed everything without disrupting his software configuration. I think, on a personal basis, that helped. Amiga Forever, and with it legal Amiga emulation, may perhaps not have been possible if it hadn't been for a Windows malfunction. :-) After that, I believe that he began to trust us more. But still, it was not enough to convince Gateway.

[Pictured: Amiga Explorer in use; included in Amiga Forever]

While we had already been busy for months working on Amiga Explorer (the easy to set up Amiga-PC networking software included in Amiga Forever), and we were contacting all emulation developers to obtain their permission and help (with the approval of Bernd, Mathias and other UAE "spiritual leaders"), we still did not have the final OK from Gateway for the Amiga Forever project. That came only after the meeting of UAE developers in Freiburg. At last, at the end of September 1997, we obtained the license to all Amiga patents, trademarks, and copyrights required for the Amiga hardware emulation and ROM and OS files, inclusive of the official "Powered by Amiga" logo. This gave us little more than a month to prepare a version 1.0 product for the Computer '97 show in Cologne.

[Pictured: Amiga Forever 1.0 demonstration at Amiga dinner on November 15, 1997. Some people who later in 2001 claimed that their product was "the first Amiga notebook" were also in the room, which led to exchanges of opinions such as the one here :-)]

Amiga Forever 1.0 already embodied the initial concept that we are still working on: easy to access Amiga emulation, data sharing, and culture. The first version contained an interview I did with Jay Miner in 1990, and which was the first step of a digital archive which currently amounts to over one terabyte of digitized video data (if any of your readers has some interesting videos, I would like to encourage them to contact me, we will do professional conversions to digital at no cost). Among other things, we felt that it was important for the emulation to run straight from CD, if so desired, so people could use it and show it at school, university, and work, without having to install it. And we wanted to offer some easy to use Amiga-to-PC data sharing software. Just as people said that Amiga emulation was impossible, there were engineers who said that it would be impossible for some software to self-transfer over a serial cable (with no software on the Amiga side other than a boot disk), but we did just that. I like to believe that with Amiga Forever we contributed a little bit to keep the magic of Amiga alive, supporting a community of faithful Amiga users with aging hardware, and sharing it with new Amiga friends. This also allowed Amiga emulation to prosper and evolve under a legal umbrella, to the point where it might now help, for example, to support legacy Amiga software that needs to run on Amiga OS 4.0. Amiga Forever 5.0 includes more than 100 individually licensed components, ranging from GIF/LZW technology patented by Unisys, to Picasso96 drivers, to applications, to icons, to palettes, to videos. We even managed to re-license old gems such as the Amiga speech synthesis (Commodore-Amiga had not renewed this license). Sadly, Amiga interest appeared to slow down a bit over the past few years, so that we did not keep up with the yearly pace of previous Amiga Forever updates from version 1.0 to 5.0. The last version of Amiga Forever dates back to 2001, however we kept providing free online updates. We appreciate the trust that people put in us, making this experience of a lifetime possible, and one way or another we will keep working to improve this package and add new and exciting content.

It has to be mentioned that we did not make everybody happy with this project. During the fall of 1997 some people even wrote that they would place a bomb in our building for what we were doing, i.e. "killing the Amiga" [which led to this]. On the opposite end, some emulation supporters who did not seem to care much about intellectual property rights were heard saying similar things. :-) I think, only time can tell whether these were good choices or not. We certainly embraced it with enthusiasm, with the perspective of users who needed this very badly ourselves, and with deep respect and daily gratitude towards Bernd and all other contributors (the Credits section in Amiga Forever lists the names of several hundred people). Commercially, I don't know whether it has been time well-spent. But for sure, it felt better than full time on high end but somewhat boring accounting software. :-) This has been a lot of fun, and it allowed us to stay in touch with this wonderful community in spite of very difficult times.

Thank you everybody, for making all of this possible, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Michael C. Battilana and your Cloanto Team