Introduction

What the guide asks you to gather

The requirements list, with WinUAE taken off 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.

Before any of the steps, the guide asks you to gather things. Most of them are software you already own, and those stay on the list. The emulator is the one item that goes away, because on a MiSTer the core is the computer.

Eliminated
WinUAE
A copy of WinUAE from winuae.net.
Eliminated. The Minimig core is the computer. There is no setup program to run.
By hand
Workbench disks
The six Workbench 3.1 ADFs.
Still required. Use the disks you own, or the set from Amiga Forever. The installer still reads them one at a time.
Once
Kickstart
A 3.0 or 3.1 Kickstart ROM image.
The file goes in games/Amiga/, named so the OSD can see it. Set it in the OSD (F12) and save the configuration. The WinUAE Roms folder does not exist here.
Automated
lha and Installer
lha.run and Installer, downloaded into a host folder.
The downloads stay. The host folder does not. pack_directory_hdf.sh turns that folder into a slave hardfile, which is what the core mounts.
Automated
Desk archives
Picasso96, MUI, ClassAct, MagicWB or NewIcons, and Scalos.
Picasso96, MUI, and ClassAct are written onto the system hardfile by install_picasso96.sh, install_mui.sh, and install_classact.sh. MagicWB, NewIcons, and Scalos still go through their installers. Packing an archive onto a slave hardfile remains how a drawer full of those archives is mounted.
Automated
WHDLoad
The WHDLoad archive, saved into that same host folder.
On the A1200 hardfile we moved, C:WHDLoad was already there, so the installer was skipped. A fresh Workbench still runs it. The games live on the slave hardfile, not in a Windows directory.
Eliminated
AmiCDROM
AmiCDROM, plus WinUAE SCSI emulation.
Eliminated. uaescsi.device is a host driver. The core has no equivalent in this setup.
Eliminated
AWeb’s network
AWeb, plus bsdsocket.library emulation.
The package can still be unpacked. The network tick cannot. The core does not provide bsdsocket.library, so the browser has nothing to connect with.

Step numbers follow Introduction & Requirements in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.