The bench

Somewhere there is an Amiga 1200 you wanted. Maybe you had one and sold it when the PC arrived. Maybe you were the kid at a friend’s house watching Workbench come up on a 1084 and never got your own. An emulator gives you the machine back. What it does not give you is the desktop: the one that took its owner years of Aminet downloads to arrive at, with a big screen, modern windows, color icons, and every game on the hard disk.

These notes are about getting to that desktop fast, from disks you are allowed to have, with scripts doing the parts that were only ever file copies. Think of what Intune Autopilot or Jamf does to a new laptop, done to a 1992 computer: not a disk image handed over, but the steps that make one, run in order and checked, with AmiPilot as the eyes. Three are stories. Four are ledgers, one row per step of the guide, saying what a script now does and what is still a click. Eight are about one component each, Picasso96 to the MiSTer itself: what it is, where it came from, what it looks like on this disk, and at the end of each, which of its steps the scripts and AmiPilot took over and how. Start with the install.

The components

Each thing on the disk, one note apiece. What it is and who made it, what it looks like on this machine, in real captures from the board and the emulator, and a ledger at the end of each saying which of its setup steps the scripts and AmiPilot took over, how, and what is still a click. Where a picture is owed it says so.