Workbench 3.1 in WinUAE

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.

The story behind this ledger is the install. What follows is one row per step of the guide, for anyone repeating the work on a PC.

Automated a script or the named pipeSkipped not part of the installA setting written into a1200.uaeStill a button a click inside the emulation

From the directory that has the scripts:

scripts/fetch_archives.sh archives winuae
scripts/setup_winuae.sh --out build --kick kick31.rom --programs /path/Programs \
    --picasso archives/Picasso96.lha --mui archives/mui38usr.lha \
    --classact archives/classact33.lha --newicons archives/NewIcons46.lha \
    --scalos archives/Scalos.lha --amipilot amipilot.lha \
    --lha lha_68020 --installer Installer
winuae64.exe -f build/a1200.uae

That creates a 22 MB System volume with directory cache, mounts it as DH0, mounts Programs as DH1, and writes uaegfx, MUI, ClassAct, NewIcons, Scalos, lha, Installer, and AmiPilot onto the disk, with Scalos set to boot as the Backdrop and the MagicWB palette on all eight pens. scsi=true, bsdsocket_emu=true, and the serial bridge AmiPilot talks over are already in the configuration. The six Workbench disks are the next page. Proceed, ScreenMode, Snapshot, and the Stuntzi save stay clicks.

After any change to the disk, from Cygwin on the Windows host that runs WinUAE:

scripts/verify_winuae_desktop.sh --winuae 'C:/Program Files/WinUAE/winuae64.exe' \
    --config build/a1200.uae --artifacts build/desktop-verify --require-backdrop
scripts/show_drawer.sh SYS:UserTools/StateOfTheArt --artifacts build/drawer

The first quits WinUAE through its pipe so the hardfile flushes, launches it again, waits for AmiPilot, checks that Scalos came up as the Backdrop on its own, reads the desktop icons back for their color pictures, captures the client area, and writes report.json with one ok. A pass after that restart is persistence evidence. The second opens one drawer and prints what each icon in it is made of, the check that told the RomIcon from the palette.

Manual steps: The Green Amiga Alien guide. Commands: amiga-utils. The MiSTer ledger is the other guide. Its Picasso script deletes uaegfx. This one installs it.