The six disks

Insert, eject, reset

wb31_session.py swaps the Workbench disks. Proceed is still the installer.

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 volume is already formatted, so HDToolBox and the Format window do not open. What remains of chapter 2 is Commodore’s Workbench installer, the one program that has to copy your disks, because your disks are the only place Workbench can come from. It asks for a disk by name. The named pipe puts that disk in DF0. The pipe does not press Proceed, and it does not choose the language, the printer, or the keymap.

Automated
Start on Install
Put the Install disk in DF0 and boot.
python wb31_session.py --winuae winuae.exe --kick kick31.rom --hdf build/Workbench.hdf --install Install.adf --workbench Workbench.adf --locale Locale.adf --extras Extras.adf --fonts Fonts.adf --storage Storage.adf
Still a button
Proceed
Choose Intermediate User and press Proceed With Install.
That button, and the language, printer, and keymap windows after it, are still clicks inside the emulation.
Automated
The next disk
The installer asks for Workbench, then Locale, Extras, Fonts, and Storage.
On the session’s stdin: insert workbench, then insert locale, insert extras, insert fonts, insert storage.
Automated
Eject
Empty both floppy drives when the copy finishes.
eject and eject 1. Those send AKS_EFLOPPY0 1 and AKS_EFLOPPY1 1.
Still a button
Reboot
The installer asks to reboot, then you press Proceed.
When it asks, type reset. That is AKS_SOFTRESET 1. The Proceed that requests the reboot is still the installer.

The manual steps are Chapter 2 of the Green Amiga Alien guide. The commands are in amiga-utils.