Chapter 7

ClassAct

Only the NewIcons installer and AWeb ask for it.

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.

ClassAct is a dependency, not a desktop. MagicWB does not need it. The NewIcons installer in the next chapter does, and so does AWeb if you still unpack that browser.

Eliminated
Skip
The guide installs ClassAct before NewIcons and AWeb.
Eliminated when the icon set is MagicWB. AWeb’s network is eliminated later, which removes the other reason to be here.
Automated
a
Copy classact2demo.lha into Programs.
The archive stays on the host. install_classact.sh reads classact33.lha or the demo archive directly.
Eliminated
b
Reload WinUAE and start.
Eliminated. The copy happens while the hardfile is a file on the host.
Automated
c–e
Shell, extract, endcli.
7z unpacks the archive on the host. The Shell does not open.
Automated
1–8
Install_Classes, Intermediate User, SYS:Classes, the Proceed path.
The script copies the Classes directory onto the system volume, including window.class and the gadgets. A Prefs program in the archive is copied too.
Once
9
Reset.
Reset in the OSD.

Step numbers follow Chapter 7 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.