The drawers

MUI, ClassAct, and the kickstart drawer

Three scripts write the drawers the installers were copying.

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.

MUI and ClassAct are the libraries later Amiga software expects, and their installers are windows that copy a known drawer onto the system partition. The WHDLoad chapter stops at its own installer. A slave that uses kickemu looks for a named file in Devs:Kickstarts. Pass the archives and the ROMs you already have to setup_winuae.sh, or run the three scripts on the finished hardfile.

Automated
MUI
Run Install-MUI as Intermediate User onto the system partition. Demos are optional.
./install_mui.sh Workbench.hdf mui38usr.lha writes the drawer, the preferences programs, and the MUI: assign. Demos are left out. setup_winuae.sh --mui mui38usr.lha does the same.
Still a button
Stuntzi
Open MUI preferences, load Stuntzi.prefs, and save.
The preset is already in MUI:Presets. Save is still that menu. MUI windows show AmiPilot unlabelled gadgets, so this one is not scripted yet.
Automated
NewIcons, Scalos
Chapters 9 and 10 of the guide, on the WinUAE disk.
--newicons NewIcons46.lha --scalos Scalos.lha on the setup script write both, with Scalos set to boot as the Backdrop and the MagicWB palette on all eight pens. The first boot merges the NewIcons pictures into the disk and trashcan icons.
Automated
AmiPilot
Not in the guide.
--amipilot amipilot.lha installs AmiPilotServer and a delayed start from S:User-Startup, and writes the WinUAE serial bridge on port 1234. It is what verify_winuae_desktop.sh and show_drawer.sh talk to.
Automated
ClassAct
Run Install_Classes onto SYS:Classes.
./install_classact.sh Workbench.hdf classact33.lha. MagicWB does not need this chapter. --classact on the setup script is the same write.
Automated
Kickstarts
A kickemu slave looks for kick34005.A500, kick40068.A1200, and the other fixed names.
./install_kickstarts.sh Workbench.hdf kick.rom renames an image you already have and can add the matching .RTB from the skick archive. It does not download a ROM. Repeat --whd-rom on the setup script for each image.

The manual steps are Chapters 6, 7, and 11 of the Green Amiga Alien guide. The commands are in amiga-utils.