10 · The driver

A driver, instead of the properties window

WinUAE’s named pipe inserts disks and resets. The installer buttons stay on the Amiga.

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.

The pipe is how the host talks to WinUAE while the Amiga is running, and it is what lets a script feed the installer its disks. Rows marked Automated in the other chapters are these commands. The properties window is a view of the same settings a .uae file already stores. Clicking it is the equivalent of clicking browser chrome. WinUAE opens a Windows named pipe, \\.\pipe\WinUAE, before the emulation starts. Each message is a NUL-terminated line. Two tokens go to the parser that also reads a config file:

01 Start with WinUAE.exe -f a1200.uae -s use_gui=no so the pipe is the control path.
02 Write floppy0 C:\Disks\Install.adf and a trailing NUL. A reply that begins with 200 means the disk is in DF0. 404 means the key was unknown.
03 When the installer asks for the next floppy, send floppy0 again with Workbench, Locale, Extras, Fonts, then Storage.
04 AKS_EFLOPPY0 1 ejects DF0. floppy0 . clears the same slot in the configuration.
05 AKS_SOFTRESET 1 resets. IPC_QUIT closes WinUAE.

amiga-utils has the client as scripts/winuae_driver.py. It uses the Win32 pipe API, so it runs under Windows Python, next to WinUAE. scripts/wb31_session.py starts an A1200 with the Install disk in DF0 and a hardfile on uae0, then reads insert workbench, eject, reset, and quit from stdin.

HDToolBox and the Installer’s Proceed buttons are windows drawn by the Amiga. The pipe changes emulator state: which ROM, which hardfile, which ADF, and whether the machine resets. After the install, the hardfile is the one the hardfile note copies onto the MiSTer.

The pipe is created in WinUAE’s win32.cpp and parsed in uaeipc.cpp. Input names such as AKS_SOFTRESET come from aks.def.