Amiga Forever 2008 Released

For you Amiga fans in the audience, via email: Remember when computers were fun? Thanks to your past support we were able to spend two years developing Amiga Forever 2008. More than ever, this new version brings back the beauty and excellence of Amiga and the excitement of its software into a new dimension of immediate accessibility and enjoyment. Before delving into more details, here is a quick link to the special upgrade offer (only $29.95 for the Plus Edition, or $39.95 for the Premium Edition, and you get new full versions, not upgrades): http://www.amigaforever.com/go/2008/ When we released Amiga Forever 2005 three years ago, after working for months on the DVDs alone, we thought there was not much that could be improved. After that, the 2006 version was an incremental update. Well, we now managed to surprise even ourselves, because Amiga Forever 2008 is a revolutionary update which makes all previous versions pale in comparison. The new player is a labor of love down to the individual pixel, like in the old Amiga days. And what it does is disrupting, for it is changing the way people perceive emulation. The new 100+ demoscene productions are simply beautiful to watch and listen to (and you keep wondering, "How did they do it, in real time, on a 68000 CPU?"). Then there are 100+ games (all with short instructions). And new gallery items (my favorite is the 1979 Tripos article, an Amiga Forever exclusive which shows more similarities with AmigaDOS than most of us would have expected). The new player for Windows feels as familiar and easy to use as a media player, while providing easy access to a universe of free downloads. It uses heuristic logic to autoconfigure downloaded games, and supports features such as double clicks on disk images (yes, you can download an ADF and "run" it!), saved states, disk write undo a

Paul Thurrott

June 8, 2008

3 Min Read
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For you Amiga fans in the audience, via email:

Remember when computers were fun? Thanks to your past support
we were able to spend two years developing Amiga Forever 2008.
More than ever, this new version brings back the beauty and
excellence of Amiga and the excitement of its software into
a new dimension of immediate accessibility and enjoyment.
Before delving into more details, here is a quick link to
the special upgrade offer (only $29.95 for the Plus Edition,
or $39.95 for the Premium Edition, and you get new full
versions, not upgrades):

http://www.amigaforever.com/go/2008/

When we released Amiga Forever 2005 three years ago, after
working for months on the DVDs alone, we thought there was not
much that could be improved. After that, the 2006 version was
an incremental update. Well, we now managed to surprise even
ourselves, because Amiga Forever 2008 is a revolutionary update
which makes all previous versions pale in comparison. The new
player is a labor of love down to the individual pixel, like in
the old Amiga days. And what it does is disrupting, for it is
changing the way people perceive emulation. The new 100+
demoscene productions are simply beautiful to watch and listen
to (and you keep wondering, "How did they do it, in real time,
on a 68000 CPU?"). Then there are 100+ games (all with short
instructions). And new gallery items (my favorite is the 1979
Tripos article, an Amiga Forever exclusive which shows more
similarities with AmigaDOS than most of us would have expected).
The new player for Windows feels as familiar and easy to use as
a media player, while providing easy access to a universe of
free downloads. It uses heuristic logic to autoconfigure
downloaded games, and supports features such as double clicks
on disk images (yes, you can download an ADF and "run" it!),
saved states, disk write undo and dual-monitor setups.

On the cross-platform front, the KX Light boot environment
features a new kernel and hard disk installation (with online
updates). The Gallery section includes the full and original
1979 Tripos (Amiga OS precursor) presentation, and new "top
secret" Amiga-Atari documents, while tons of new games and
demoscene productions are sure to deliver hours of enjoyment.
For the technically-minded, Amiga Forever 2008 also includes
new ROMs, new ADFs, new HDFs, and better support for WHDLoad,
AmiKit and AmigaSYS.

I could spend hours describing details of the new player, but
Amiga Forever 2008 is much more than a list of features, even
if they took exhaustingly longer than in the past to develop.
Amiga Forever is not about a player. Amiga Forever is about
emotions, about a direction, about extending our past
commitments into the future, and enjoying the relationship with
fellow Amiga friends like yourself along the way.

You may have heard that we cataloged more than ten-thousand
Amiga games. Two years ago we didn't even know the Amiga had so
many games! Why did we do this? See the link below for the
details. Let me just add that the Amiga Forever 2008 player
already features a button that goes beyond the local search
function, and taps into a free online system that we are
working on. More integration with the database will follow,
also via free updates.

For additional information:

New Features
http://www.amigaforever.com/whatsnew/

Screenshots
http://www.amigaforever.com/screenshots/

Quick Tips for Upgraders
http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/5-121.html

Amiga Forever Cataloging Effort Reaches 10K Milestone
http://www.amigaforever.com/news-events/20071214cataloging.html

And again the upgrade link, if you would like to enjoy the
many new features and support our effort:

http://www.amigaforever.com/go/2008/

The Plus Edition is only $29.95, while the Premium Edition
is $39.95.

About the Author

Paul Thurrott

Paul Thurrott is senior technical analyst for Windows IT Pro. He writes the SuperSite for Windows, a weekly editorial for Windows IT Pro UPDATE, and a daily Windows news and information newsletter called WinInfo Daily UPDATE.

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