Chapter 13

AWeb

The browser can be copied. The network tick cannot.

Why any of this

The Amiga 1200 was the last great Amiga Commodore made, and the desktop people built on it is the one worth having back: Kickstart 3.1, AGA, a hard disk, a graphics card for a screen bigger than the chipset could draw, MUI for modern windows, color icons, and WHDLoad so every game lives on the disk instead of in a box of floppies. An emulator or a MiSTer puts that machine back on your desk. Getting to that finished desktop is the work.

You cannot download it ready-made. Workbench and Kickstart still belong to someone, so the disks and the ROM have to be yours, and Commodore’s own installer has to copy them. Everything after that is a recipe of Proceed buttons, the Green Amiga Alien guide, which people have followed by hand for twenty years. These notes turn that recipe into scripts, so someone new to Amiga emulation gets the upgraded A1200 in an afternoon, from disks they own.

The end of the road is a build nobody babysits. AmiPilot can sit inside the running Amiga, click what is left of the installers, and take a picture of the screen, so an AI agent can check that the desktop came up, that the icons are in color, that a game launches, and fix the script when they are not. Every page here is one step toward that.

AWeb is the browser, and the guide installs it so the finished A1200 can reach the web. Its installer is ordinary. The step that makes it a browser is a tick in WinUAE’s misc page, from chapter 1, and the core has no such tick.

Eliminated
ClassAct
The guide sends you back to chapter 7 first.
That dependency stays only if you insist on unpacking AWeb. The network it was going to use is the next row.
Automated
1
Save AWeb_APL34_full_020.lha into Programs.
If you still want the files on a disk, pack_directory_hdf.sh turns that folder into a slave hardfile, which is what the core mounts.
Eliminated
2
Reload the configuration, tick bsdsocket.library emulation, and save.
Eliminated. The core does not emulate that library. Resaving a WinUAE config has no effect on the OSD.
Eliminated
3
Click Start.
Eliminated. Boot the core.
By hand
4–18
Extract, run Install, Intermediate User, the system partition, English, More than 2 MB, then reset.
Still the Installer, and still only worth doing if you want the program on the disk. Reset is the OSD.
Eliminated
19
Open AWeb and use it.
The icon can open. Pages cannot load. Nothing on the core answers the bsdsocket calls the browser makes.

Step numbers follow Chapter 13 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.