The Greatest Ever Amiga Software?
Hello to one and all,
What is the greatest ever piece of Amiga software? In my own personal opinion Winuae is.
"How can this be" i hear you ask? Well it just does all things Amiga and some things even better than the Amiga, Others will say it doesn't "feel" like an Amiga, so to answer this I built a satin black Amiga that I took to the Retro Replay show in Blackpool, It was an Amiga case with a Keyrah inside along with a X86 laptop motherboard (the full build details are here http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?15613-L-amiga-project/page9&highlight=Project), Via the Keyrah it had the A1200 keyboard and mouse with a Konix joystick. I set up the machine to boot straight into Winuae and into OS 3.9, then installed the usual iGame with WHDLoad plus some other more high-end games such as Doom and Shadow of the Third Moon etc. I initially set it up with Superfrog running. The results were impressive, people turned up, picked up the joystick and started playing Superfrog without any idea they were using a PC. One of the guys from Team 17 actually came over and played Alien Breed 3D II and his only question was "how have you managed to get it playing so smoothly?" :). So no-one knew it was a PC until they knew it was a PC :). The keyrah makes a difference as the Amiga keyboard and mouse really help with the "feel" of the machine. So if it looks like an Amiga, sounds like an Amiga and feels like an Amiga, is it an Amiga? (Lol stop shouting at me it is only an opinion ;) )
Getting back to why Winuae (available here btw (http://www.winuae.net/) is the greatest ever Amiga software, it has enabled 100s if not thousands of users to get back into the Amiga and relive their childhood. It has provided the means to play all the old games, in turn setting up many sites with ADFs which has saved the software for future generations. It has encouraged hardware to be developed (Keyrah, Catweasel etc); interest returning to the original hardware because the emulation kick started the bug again, Software has been written for it, libs updated etc, original hardware benefits from having hard drives/CF cards setup on it before being installed into the original machines, you can run anything from an A500 1.3 to a CD32 to an A4000 PPC 4.1 machine. It is even helping AROS and in turn Icaros Desktop.
Without Winuae would the Amiga community be as alive and thriving as it is today? I think not. Let's take time to thank Toni Wilen for the incredible things he has achieved and for what he is still doing with the Greatest Ever Piece of Amiga Software.
Thanks, Justin
