Somewhere there is an Amiga 1200 you wanted. Maybe you had one and sold it when the PC arrived. Maybe you were the kid at a friend’s house watching Workbench come up on a 1084 and never got your own. The 1200 was the last great Amiga Commodore made, and the machine people remember is the one its owner spent years on: Kickstart 3.1, AGA, a hard disk named System, a graphics card for a screen bigger than the chipset could draw, MUI so the newer programs had proper windows, color icons, and WHDLoad so every game lived on the disk instead of in a shoebox of floppies. That is what an emulator is for. Not the machine as it left the factory. The machine as it was actually used.
Getting there is the catch. You cannot download that desktop finished, because Workbench and Kickstart still belong to someone. The six disks and the ROM have to be yours, and Commodore’s own installer has to copy them onto the disk. After that comes the part everyone dreads: the Green Amiga Alien guide, the recipe the whole community trusts, thirteen chapters of it, most of them the same installer window asking you to press Proceed. WHDLoad wants a hard disk and kickstart images with fixed names. Picasso96 wants to know which graphics board. MUI and ClassAct want drawers in the right places. Done by hand it is an afternoon, and one wrong tick early on shows up as a broken desktop at the end.
What we wanted is the thing an IT department does to a new laptop. A Windows machine enrolled in Intune Autopilot, or a Mac that Jamf takes over the moment it is unboxed, does not arrive as a golden image someone copied. It arrives bare, and a list of steps runs against it, in order, each step named, each step checked, and the result is the same on every desk. So we did not want to ship a disk image and hope. We wanted to ship the prep scripts: a set of steps that say, one after another, how an Amiga is supposed to be set up, and that are the story of that setup as much as its mechanism. When a step is still a click, the script says so instead of pretending.
It is also, on purpose, a Workbench 3.1 story. Hyperion’s AmigaOS 3.2 folds a good deal of this afternoon into its own installer: ReAction, the descendant of ClassAct, is part of the OS; the installer offers GlowIcons, its own 256-color icon set, as a tick box; Workbench Prefs has a switch for the MagicWB palette and another for NewIcons, which would have saved us an evening; and the whole thing ships as a bootable CD image with every disk on it. Picasso96 is still a separate download, and Proceed is still Proceed. If you own 3.2, start there. The desktop people remember, and the one an emulator or a MiSTer boots from a Kickstart 3.1 ROM, is the 3.1 one, and that is the one these scripts build.
The painful part is that almost every chapter is the same window, confirming a copy you could have made before the emulator started.
You open WinUAE and walk a tree of property pages. You create a 22 MB hardfile by hand, then boot HDToolBox, then Format, and you have to tick Fast File System, international names, and directory cache, and you have to hit Format rather than Quick Format. Then the Workbench installer asks for six disks, one after another. Then a Shell. Then Picasso96, which is dozens of Proceed buttons and one real choice: which graphics board. Then MUI. Then ClassAct. Miss a tick and the volume comes up wrong, and you get to learn that at the end.
What comes off your hands
The copies and the property pages are the part a script can do honestly, because they land in known places. One command writes the 22 MB System volume the format dialog was asking for, directory cache included, and writes the WinUAE configuration that used to be that first chapter: 68020, FPU, AGA, 2 MB of chip RAM, fast RAM, a graphics card with memory, Faster RTG, a Programs folder if you have one, uaescsi, and a network socket. Pass the archives you already downloaded and the same command puts uaegfx, MUI, ClassAct, NewIcons, Scalos, lha, Installer, and AmiPilot on the disk, and any kickstart images WHDLoad slaves will ask for by name. fetch_archives.sh pulls the freeware ones from Aminet in one go; it never fetches a ROM or a Workbench disk. The Shell never opens. HDToolBox never opens. The Picasso96 installer never asks which board, because on WinUAE the board is uaegfx and the script writes that card. Scalos comes up as the Backdrop on the first boot, with the MagicWB palette on all eight pens, because the two preference files that decide that are written on the host too.
When the Workbench installer does run, it still asks for a disk by name. WinUAE can take that disk from a pipe, so you type insert workbench instead of opening the floppy page, pressing F12, and browsing to an ADF. Locale, Extras, Fonts, and Storage are the same sentence.
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
What stays yours
A few windows are decisions, and a script that clicked them would be guessing. The Workbench installer still wants a language, a printer, and a keymap, and it still wants Proceed. ScreenMode is where you pick the uaegfx resolution and save it. Snapshot is you arranging the desktop. MUI’s Stuntzi preset is already on the disk; saving it is a menu. NewIcons and Scalos are on the disk already; the first boot merges the color pictures into the disk and trashcan icons on its own. A game installer that asks for the original disk gets that disk from the same pipe, and its own Proceed button stays.
That is the shape of a finished afternoon: the machine exists before you sit down, and the clicks that remain are the ones with your name on them.
How we know it worked
A script that writes files can check that the files are there, and check_guide_hdf.sh does exactly that. It cannot see the desktop. It cannot tell you whether the State of the Art icon came up in color or as a black-and-white dither, whether ScreenMode actually took the RTG resolution, or whether Giana Sisters starts when you double-click it. We found each of those out the slow way, standing at the MiSTer, and every one of them was a thing a person had to look at. The icon one has since been looked at properly, by a script that decodes the file and a capture that counts the pixels; that is Eight pens.
That piece exists now. AmiPilot runs inside the Amiga and lets a program on another machine find a window, click a button, type into a field, read a file, and take a picture of the screen, including a Picasso96 screen. setup_winuae.sh --amipilot installs it and wires it to WinUAE over a virtual serial line, delayed so it never holds up Workbench. On top of it sit the checks. verify_winuae_desktop.sh asks a running WinUAE to quit through its pipe so the hardfile flushes, launches the machine again, waits for AmiPilot, confirms Scalos came up as the Backdrop by itself, reads the desktop icons back for their NewIcon data, captures the client area, and counts colors. Because the emulator was restarted first, a pass is evidence that the change survived a boot, not that it looked right for a moment. show_drawer.sh opens one drawer, pulls its icons, and prints what each is actually made of. run_interactive_winuae_acceptance.sh goes further on a fresh disk and drives ScreenMode itself, picking the uaegfx row by reading the width and height back rather than counting clicks.
An AI agent reads the same screenshot you would. Desktop up on the RTG screen, yes or no. Icons in color, yes or no. When the answer is no, it has the scripts, the guide, the picture, and the decoded files, and it fixes the build. That is how the palette got sorted, and how the RomIcon got sorted, without anyone standing at a TV. What AmiPilot still cannot see is a game: WHDLoad takes the machine over and pauses the OS AmiPilot lives in, so proving that Giana Sisters starts is a job for a capture card, and it is still open. The scripts on this page are the first half. The eyes are the second, and they are the reason the scripts have to be honest about what they leave behind.
What has to be on the desk
The scripts do not fetch a ROM or a Workbench disk. They arrange files you are allowed to have. On the machine where you run them you need Python, xdftool from amitools, and 7z for the archives.
- 01A Kickstart 3.1 ROM you already own. The A1200 image is the one this configuration boots.
- 02The six Workbench 3.1 disks as ADF: Install, Workbench, Locale, Extras, Fonts, Storage.
- 03WinUAE on Windows. The disk swaps talk to its named pipe, which exists on that machine.
- 04Picasso96.lha from Aminet, if you want the high-resolution screen. fetch_archives.sh archives winuae downloads it and the rest of this list’s freeware.
- 05mui38usr.lha, classact33.lha, NewIcons46.lha, and Scalos.lha, if you want that desktop. lha for the 68020, and Installer. amipilot.lha from its release page, if you want the machine to check itself.
- 06Optional: a Programs folder, and any kickstart images you already own for WHDLoad slaves. The script renames them. It does not download one.
The scripts live in amiga-utils. pip install amitools provides xdftool. test_host_installs.sh runs every installer on synthetic volumes for both machines and then the unit tests; it is what we run before touching a page here.
The other machine
A MiSTer running the Minimig core wants the same Workbench and a different graphics card. It mounts hardfiles. A Programs folder has to become a second hardfile before the core will see it. Picasso96 there is the MiSTer monitor, written by a different script, because the uaegfx card belongs to WinUAE. One command, build_mister_image.sh, takes a Workbench hardfile that boots, runs the whole chain against a copy, checks the result, and ships it to the card under a new name.
If the board is where the machine will live, that story is the core. The step ledger beside it is for repeating the work.
Step by step, for anyone repeating the work: the WinUAE ledger and the MiSTer ledger. The recipe they follow is the Green Amiga Alien guide.