Chapter 3

Windows, Clean Up, and Snapshot

Nothing here is a host setting. The menus stay.

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.

Arranging the desktop is the part you would want to do yourself anyway. This chapter never leaves Workbench. There is no WinUAE page to delete and no pipe command that moves a window.

Eliminated
1
Reload the WinUAE configuration and start the emulation.
Eliminated. Boot the core.
By hand
2–6
Open a drawer, drag its title bar, and resize from the bottom-right corner.
Still the mouse. Snapshot stores the result on the hardfile, so it survives a reboot of the core.
By hand
7–8
Window menu, Clean Up.
Still that menu.
By hand
9–11
Snapshot, All, then repeat for every drawer and the root of the partition.
Still that menu. Snapshot Window only stores the window size. Snapshot All stores the icons as well.

Step numbers follow Chapter 3 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.