Chapter 5

Picasso96

The Proceed path is a copy onto the hardfile. uaegfx is not among the files.

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 screen bigger than the chipset can draw is the first thing that makes the A1200 feel modern. Picasso96 on WinUAE speaks to a card called uaegfx. The core has its own framebuffer. The installer spends its clicks choosing that board and confirming drawers. The files those clicks copy are already in the archive, and the monitor the core actually uses is a different archive.

Automated
a
Copy Picasso96.lha into the Programs directory.
The archive stays on the host. install_picasso96.sh reads it directly. It does not need a Programs volume.
Eliminated
b
Reload WinUAE and start the emulation.
Eliminated. The copy happens while the hardfile is a file on the host.
Automated
c–e
Shell, extract the archive onto the slave volume, endcli.
7z unpacks the archive on the host. The Shell does not open.
Automated
1–9
Run Picasso96Install, Setup, and the Proceed path through the documentation question.
Eliminated as clicks. The script copies Libs:rtg.library, Libs:Picasso96API.library, emulation.library, and fastlayers.library. The card drivers for real boards are not copied.
Automated
10
Leave the board set to uaegfx and nothing else.
uaegfx is not installed. If a previous install left Devs:Monitors/uaegfx, the script deletes it. MiSTer_RTG.lha from the core’s extra/rtg_driver is written onto the system volume: the MiSTer monitor, its icon, MiSTer.card, and Devs:Picasso96Settings.
Automated
11–31
Accept the drawers it offers, and confirm the copies.
Those confirms are the copies in the two rows above. The script writes the files into the drawers.
Eliminated
32–33
Skip Picasso96Mode. The guide already says that preference is for a real graphics card.
Eliminated. The core is not that card, and the script does not copy the mode editor.
Automated
34–38
The remaining Proceed and copy confirmations.
Same write. Nothing in this stretch is a choice the core still needs.
Once
39
Reset with the three Amiga keys, or F12 and the WinUAE reset button.
Reset in the OSD. The CPU has to be a 68020 before the RTG driver will come up.
Automated
40–44
ScreenMode, uaegfx 640×480 or 800×600, colors to the right, Save.
The uaegfx mode is not there. build_mister_image.sh writes MiSTer:1280x720 16bit PC, the 62 bytes the board saved after that row was chosen once by hand and read back. The 24-bit rows of the same size draw wrong colors through HDMI, and check_guide_hdf.sh rejects them. AGA remains the chipset the games use.

Step numbers follow Chapter 5 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.