Emulation-free Amiga

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John Knight spends his days dodging wildfires, maskless citizens and spiders… always the spiders when not writing about open source..

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 Configuration windows will often have the choices of Save and Use. If that’s confusing, Save will store the configuration to be used now and in the future, whereas Use will only try the setting during boot.

Even though keyboard-driven cutting and pasting doesn’t work for the file manager, it does work for text. Just remember to use the Right Amiga key instead of Ctrl.

If you don’t have any Amiga (aka. “Windows") keys, or you only have just the one, F11 and F12 will act as substitutes for the left and right Amiga keys, respectively.

Are you tired of modern PC desktops and want to use your computer like an Amiga? AROS has you covered. If you’ve never heard of AROS (originally Amiga Research Operating System), it’s a free and open source API reimplementation of the Amiga OS, that supports x86 and PowerPC machines, as well the Raspberry Pi and even the Amiga 1200. AROS can be run on original Amiga hardware and is 100 per cent software compatible. However, on non-Motorola hardware such as your x86 PCs, old Amiga software needs to be recompiled or run through an emulator (we only lied a little bit–Ed).

We’re using Icaros, there are other choices, such as AspireOS, which provides a desktop optimised for Acer Aspire netbooks (). Or the vanilla build of AROS itself, which provides a fat-free experience. We’ve chosen Icaros because it’s the most popular with an Download page. We’ll use the full-fat 2.3GB live image, although there’s a 433MB light version for people who just want the basics.