Remember the Commodore home computers C-64 and Amiga? Commodore hardware was highly popular back in the 80s and early 90s, but several bad business decisions brought an end to the company. Still, there are plenty of people out there that look back with fond memories, and others who may be curious about gaming or programming on these old machines.
While you can purchase C-64 and Amiga hardware and software on places such as eBay, emulation is an option as well. WinUAE is probably the best Amiga emulator out there, but it does require Kickstart ROMs to function.
One way of obtaining these ROMs legally, is to purchase the official Amiga Forever emulation package.
Amiga Forever 9 and C64 Forever 9 ship with everything that users need to get started. Both products are available in different versions.
The value edition of Amiga Forever 9 is available for $9.95 as a downloadable installer for Windows. It includes Kickstarter 1.3 and Workbench, and includes 25 included games and demoscene productions.
The Plus edition includes more Kickstarter ROMs, including version 3.0, as well as more games and demoscene productions.
The Premium Edition is a physical one, with download options, and it caters to collectors for the most part as it includes lots of video content.
C64 Forever 9 is available in three editions as well: a free edition with limited features, a Plus edition with options to create a CD, and a Boxed Plus edition for collectors.
Amiga Forever 9 and C64 Forever 9 come with a number of enhancements over previous versions. The developers list the main features on the official website:
Version 9 celebrates beautiful new visual features like Arcade mode, Tile mode, light vs. dark options, and a first set of more colorful skin variants. Under the hood, hardware-accelerated technologies like Direct2D are used to provide a snappy experience. Powerful new column and tile field selection and sort options provide unprecedented control within the player interface, while a new property handler and an enhanced preview handler enable seamless content access via File Explorer and Windows Search.
The new version features new automation options to run scripts or applications on startup, and only the beginning of upcoming automation features.
Both packages include games, and the websites link to other, legal, resources, to obtain more games, demoscene productions, and applications.
Cloanto, the company behind the product, is working on a Mac version. The packages do include GNU/Linux binaries of UAE, the amiga emulator, so that emulation works on Linux as well out of the box, albeit not with the company's own Amiga Forever application.
Now You: Do you emulate older systems to relive childhood memories, or do you prefer physical hardware? If you had to name one C64 and one Amiga game, your favorite of all time, what would it be?
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