Chapter 4

lha and Installer

The Shell copies are a write into C: on the hardfile.

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.

Two small files make every later chapter possible. Every installer looks for C:Installer, and lha has to be beside it or the archives never open. The guide types both copies in a Shell. The files do not care how they arrived, so the script writes them.

Automated
a
Copy lha.run and Installer-43_3.lha into the Programs directory.
pack_directory_hdf.sh turns that folder into a slave hardfile, which is what the core mounts.
Eliminated
b
Reload the WinUAE configuration and start it.
Eliminated. The copy below happens while the hardfile is a file on the host. Boot the core after C: holds both programs.
Automated
1–3
Open the Shell and run lha.run, then copy the 68020 build to C:lha.
The Shell does not open. install_c_tools.sh writes the 68020 binary to C/lha with xdftool and sets the executable bit. That binary is the one that matches the 68020 in the OSD. lha.run is an Amiga program, so the host cannot execute it. If that is the file you still have, the same script plants it as C:lha.run and appends a block to S:User-Startup. The next boot runs the copy once, protects C:lha, and then skips the block.
Automated
4–7
Extract Installer with lha, delete the archive, copy Installer to C:, then endcli.
Same script. Pass the Installer binary, or pass Installer-43_3.lha and 7z unpacks it on the host. xdftool writes C/Installer. endcli is eliminated with the Shell. Without that file, later install scripts still open nothing.

Step numbers follow Chapter 4 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.