Chapter 6

MUI

The libraries and the MUI drawer are copied onto the hardfile. Saving a preset stays a menu.

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.

A lot of later Amiga software draws its windows with MUI, and Scalos reads its preferences through it. Install-MUI spends its clicks copying one drawer and appending an assign. The files are already in the archive, so the script does both. Demos are left out. The preset save is the click that remains.

Automated
a
Copy mui38usr.lha into Programs.
The archive stays on the host. install_mui.sh reads it 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 the archive, endcli.
7z unpacks the archive on the host. The Shell does not open.
Automated
1–12
Install-MUI, Intermediate User, install onto the system partition, skip the examples if you want.
The script copies the drawer to MUI:, puts the preferences programs in Prefs, and appends the MUI: assign to S:User-Startup. Demos are skipped unless you pass --with-demos.
Once
13
Reset with the three keys or F12.
Reset in the OSD. The assign runs from User-Startup on that boot.
By hand
14–18
Open MUI, Project, Open, Stuntzi.prefs, Save.
Still those menus. Stuntzi.prefs is already in MUI:Presets. Saving it writes the settings MUI actually loads.

Step numbers follow Chapter 6 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.