AmigaVision creates a carefully curated collection of Amiga games and demos, as well as a minimal Workbench setup with useful utilities and apps, and wraps it all in a user-friendly launcher.

It has many features specifically for use with MiSTer FPGA devices, but also aims to work with emulators like UAE and on original AGA-compatible hardware like an Amiga 1200/4000 or CD32, usually with SD/CF card adapters.

Its aim is to balance preservation of the historical and current output of the Amiga games and demo scene as accurately as possible, while still being easy to use for people new to the Amiga computer.

Contents

  1. Features
  2. Save Files
  3. Setup for Amiga hardware
  4. Setup for emulators
  5. Setup for Pocket
  6. Setup for MiSTer
  7. Optional Setups
  8. MiSTer: Gamepad & Joystick Mapping
  9. MiSTer: Video Modes
  10. MiSTer: CPU Performance Notes
  11. Workbench
  12. Non-working Games
  13. Custom Scripts
  14. Bug Reports & Feature Requests
  15. Credits
  16. Troubleshooting
  17. Frequently Asked Questions

Features

  • Supports original Amiga hardware, MiSTer, MiST and Analogue Pocket FPGA hardware recreations, as well as Amiga emulators.

  • Sophisticated and performant Amiga games and demo launcher with screenshots included, can be entirely controlled using gamepads, joysticks or via keyboard. This lets you quickly and easily experience the best of what the system has to offer.

  • Close to 2000 hand-tuned, per-game 5× integer scaling with Dynamic Crop settings on MiSTer, ensuring that games and demos make the best use of modern 1080p and 4K 16:9 displays without leaving large parts of the screen blank.

  • Carefully curated and well-tested settings for games and demos, no duplication of AGA and ECS versions, with lots of genre and top lists to help you navigate the massive amount of Amiga games available. We take special care to run every game at the correct aspect ratio and CPU speed.

  • Games are configured to run in their correct modes, games created in Europe use PAL with 5× Dynamic Crop where appropriate, whereas US-made games run in NTSC for the correct aspect ratio and CPU speed. You can optionally override this in the settings.

  • Includes key productions from the legendary Amiga demo scene, including disk magazines sorted chronologically, making it a great companion to explore the demo scene’s UNESCO-nominated cultural heritage artifacts.

  • Hand-tuned scanline and shadow mask settings for MiSTer to get you close to that original CRT look if you are using it on a modern flat panel display. Of course, the setup also works with analog output to real CRT displays.

  • Shared file system support for the MiSTer: volume, making it trivial to transfer files to and from the Amiga over WiFi or wired networks, or directly using the SD card.

  • Minimalist Workbench setup with support for including your own custom set of configurations, games, applications and files using the Saves: HD image that will survive upgrades of the main HD image.

  • RTG resolution support for running Workbench in modern resolutions like 1920×1080 and in 16:9 aspect ratios on MiSTer.

  • Uses PFS as its file system to avoid accidental corruption on write operations, which the standard FFS file system is very prone to.

  • Includes a dedicated MiSTer setup to closely mimic a stock Amiga 500 with memory expansion (for use with ADF files only) for maximum compatibility with demo scene productions and any troublesome games that rely on cycle accuracy and exact hardware timings.

  • Includes an optional, dedicated Amiga 500HD setup that gives you a representative feel for how it was to use Workbench 1.3 with a hard disk and productivity apps around 1989.

  • Includes an optional, dedicated Amiga 600HD setup that gives you a representative feel for how it was to use Workbench 2.x with an Amiga 600 or 3000 and productivity apps around 1991-1992.

Save Files

Before we start, a quick note on save files:

IMPORTANT: For games with save functionality you MUST quit the game using the DEL key to ensure the save data will be written to “disk”, and thus the SD card. You will lose your save games if you don’t exit the game after also saving in-game!

In the [Options] menu of the launcher you can choose between a few alternative quit key options if the DEL key doesn’t work for you. If set, it will override the preconfigured default Quit key. The active Quit key is displayed on the splash screen shown when a game is loading.

Setup for Amiga hardware

AmigaVision supports any AGA-capable Amiga: Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000, and Amiga CD32 — as long as it has a mass storage device like an SD card or CF card connected via an adapter to the IDE bus.

To set up AmigaVision, choose your favorite disk imaging tool — e.g. Balena Etcher for Mac, Linux and Windows, Win32 Disk Imager for Windows, or whatever tool you prefer for writing to SD/CF cards.

Simply locate the games/Amiga/MegaAGS.hdf file, and load that in your disk imaging tool of choice, and write it to the SD/CF card. If the file requester in the disk imaging tool does not allow you to select .hdf files, you may need to rename it to have a different extension, e.g. .img, .bin or similar.

If your HDF image contains every game in the database, you will need a 16GB CF/SD card. If you have a smaller card, you can make use of the configuration for the Analogue Pocket device, which will keep the selection under 4GB.

A note about save files & upgrading on Amiga hardware

Note that save files in games will only be written to disk when you quit the game as described in the Save Files section.

When installed on a single partition like this, you obviously will overwrite any save files if you upgrade AmigaVision to its newest release. The easiest way is to mount an ADF (or a real floppy!) and copy out the save files before upgrading, and put them back after the new image has been written to your SD/CF card.

Save files are located in DH0:WHDSaves — and are usually small enough that all of them fit comfortably on an ADF or a real floppy. So don’t let that stop you from upgrading to new and improved versions of AmigaVision, it’s really quite easy!

Joystick and Gamepad support on Amiga hardware

We support single-button Amiga/C64 joysticks, as well as four-button CD32 gamepads, and probably Sega Mega Drive (aka. Sega Genesis) gamepads as well — although we haven’t personally tested this.

Many WHDLoad games have been patched to support multiple buttons, so check for those options when starting a game.

Setup for emulators

We recommend — and include a setup for — the FS-UAE Amiga emulator, which supports Mac, Windows and Linux.

  1. Download and install FS-UAE.
  2. Copy the games/Amiga directory to your preferred location.
  3. Double-click the MegaAGS.fs-uae file to run the setup with the preferred settings. You can of course also add a shortcut to this file to your Windows start menu, or as an alias in the Mac’s Applications folder.

For any additional configuration or customizations, consult the FS-UAE documentation.

Setup for Pocket

AmigaVision also works great with the handheld Analogue Pocket FPGA device.

  • Download the latest version of the Amiga Pocket Core and put it on your device.
  • Copy the included files in the AmigaVision Pocket setup to the /Assets/amiga/common directory on your Pocket SD card.
  • Start the Amiga core.

Controls:

  • Left/Right triggers are Left/Right mouse buttons
  • Select button brings up the on-screen keyboard, hit DEL to quit a game
  • Start button toggles mouse emulation mode
  • A button selects an entry in the launcher
  • B button goes back to the parent category in the launcher

Setup for MiSTer

Note: If you are updating from an earlier version – we highly recommend setting aside your games/Amiga/MegaAGS-Saves.hdf file and doing this installation from scratch and then adding that file back in, as many things have changed. This is generally always the best approach when upgrading.

  • Copy the contents of the following directories to the corresponding directories in the top level on MiSTer’s file system:
_Computer
config
Filters
games
Presets
Shadow_Masks
  • Paste the following recommended core settings to the bottom of your MiSTer.ini file in the root of your MiSTer file system – these settings are further explained in the Video Modes section. It’s especially important to explicity define resolutions for both PAL and NTSC, and not rely on the automatic fallback that MiSTer has available:
[Amiga
+Amiga500
+Amiga500HD
+Amiga600HD]
video_mode_ntsc=8
video_mode_pal=9
vscale_mode=0
vsync_adjust=1
custom_aspect_ratio_1=40:27
bootscreen=0
  • Reboot your MiSTer, you should now have two entries in the Computer section:
    • Amiga for the main AmigaVision setup – you’ll be using this one 99% of the time.
    • Amiga 500 for a stock Amiga 500 hardware setup with no hard drive to use with ADF floppy disk images for any troublesome demos or games that don’t work with the main setup. Some demo ADFs are included and can be mounted as floppy disks in MiSTer’s OSD menu, invoked with the F12 key.
  • Launch the Amiga entry and enjoy! Don’t forget to check out the sections below – especially on save files, controller mappings and video modes once the basic setup is up and running.

NOTE: If you use names.txt to rename cores (or pull it down via the update_all script), you may end up with two entries that both say Amiga after this. The entry without a date listed is AmigaVision.

To fix this duplication, edit names.txt and give the Minimig core a different name — e.g. use Commodore Amiga for that entry instead, and you can use that for any setups unrelated to AmigaVision, if you so desire.

Optional Setups

(You can probably skip this section if you were not an Amiga user back in the day or unless you have a special interest in computing history :)

If you used the Amiga back in the day, you may have memories of using an Amiga 500 with a hard disk and Workbench 1.3, or maybe an Amiga 600 or 3000 with Workbench 2.x. We have included dedicated and separate setups for these in the included MegaAGS-Extras archive.

  • Copy the contents of Amiga 500 HD Setup and/or Amiga 600 HD Setup to their respective directories on the MiSTer or emulators — or, you can of course also use a disk imager to write this to an SD/CF card.
  • You will now have separate Amiga 500HD and/or Amiga600HD launch items in the Computer section. These are fully configured to support shared drives, PFS file systems (even on 1.3!), RTC clock, etc.

There are ReadMe files that go into more detail about these setups.

These are not meant to be used for games or demos, but instead for giving you a basic setup that lets you run productivity apps like you did back in the day. For games and demos, we recommend the Amiga (main AmigaVision setup) and Amiga 500 (for use with ADF files) instead.

MiSTer: Gamepad & Joystick Mapping

While many games supports two or more buttons, Amiga games were generally designed for one button joysticks. Consequently “up to jump” (or accelerate) control scheme is very common.

If you are using a gamepad, you might want to use MiSTer’s controller mapping to bind the up direction to the D-pad and/or an dedicated jump/accelerate button, typically the X button. Here’s how:

  • First, make sure to have CD32 controller mode enabled (this is the default).
  • Enter “Define joystick buttons” mode
  • Map directions as usual
  • Map the first three buttons (red, blue and yellow) to A, B and Y.
  • The fourth button (green) is practically never used, and can be mapped to Select, R2/ZL or similar – or skipped altogether.
  • Go ahead and map right/left triggers and play/pause.
  • When asked to if you want to “setup alternative buttons”, say Yes!
  • Skip all choices except “up”, which we recommend mapping to X.

While a keyboard and mouse isn’t strictly necessary to play most action games, it is definitely recommended for the full Amiga experience, and many games have controls that make use of them.

MiSTer: Video Modes

We care deeply about preserving the correct aspect ratio for all games. That means going beyond just NTSC and PAL, and ensuring that the Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR) is also correct. Pixels on the Amiga were close to square (16:15) in PAL resolutions on a CRT, but quite tall on NTSC displays (5:6). Additionally, when we apply a 5×PAL or 6×PAL Dynamic Crop, 1:1 gives us great results that are near indistinguishable from the original PAR at those sizes, while modernizing the output to fit 16:9 displays.

You no longer have to interact with the MiSTer OSD menu to switch aspect ratios in certain cases like what we informally refer to as “Jim Sachs mode” — NTSC, tall pixels at 5:6 PAR, seen in e.g. Defender of the Crown. Most emulators and captures get this wrong and use 1:1 pixels instead, so we built an implementation that handles all the variants correctly on MiSTer:

  • PAL title, 50Hz: PAL, 16:15 PAR at 4×, 1:1 PAR at 5× and 6×
  • PAL title, 60Hz: PAL60, 1:1 PAR at 5×
  • NTSC title, 60Hz: NTSC, 1:1 PAR at 5×
  • “World” title, 60Hz: NTSC, 1:1 PAR at 5×
  • “Sachs NTSC” title, 60Hz: NTSC, 5:6 PAR at 5×

All these align to the 1080p/4K 16:9 pixel grid while having the correct Pixel Aspect Ratio, so you will not get any shimmering or non-integer pixels.

On the MiSTer side of things, always, always run the AmigaVision setup in the 40:27 aspect ratio that we supply to ensure that this is handled correctly. This is what AmigaVision sets as the default as long as you copy over the supplied config file and have the correct MiSTer.ini definition for the core.

The Original aspect ratio supplied by the core should not be used. The Full Screen aspect ratio is only used for 6×PAL on 16:9 widescreen displays.

Make absolutely sure that you update your MiSTer.ini settings for the core according to the documentation! It should look like this:

[Amiga
+Amiga500
+Amiga500HD
+Amiga600HD]
video_mode_ntsc=8 
video_mode_pal=9
vscale_mode=0
vsync_adjust=1 
custom_aspect_ratio_1=40:27
bootscreen=0

vsync_adjust setting

The optimal vsync_adjust setting in MiSTer.ini will depend on your HDMI display. A setting of 2 ensures the lowest possible latency, but it may come at the cost of a short period of no video or audio on video mode changes – something Amiga games and demos do quite often. Setting vsync_adjust to 1 introduces a buffer that will smooth over most of these changes, although it will add a frame of latency.

Dynamic cropping & 5× scaling on 1080p/4K displays

A unique feature of the Amiga (Minimig) core on MiSTer is the ability to do viewport cropping. By default the full overscan area will be fed to the HDMI scaler, resulting in huge borders for most content. But fear not! AmigaVision leverages the custom vadjust feature of the core to dynamically apply viewport settings on a per-game basis. This depends on MiSTer’s “shared folder” functionality, which is enabled in AmigaVision if the “games/Amiga/shared” directory exists. So, make sure you copied all the archive contents as described in the Setup section.

Also note that dynamic cropping only applies if you are using 1080p output. Most Amiga games fit on the screen using 5× zoom in this resolution. Any other resolution or analog output is not affected by dynamic viewport cropping, as it only makes sense for 1080p/4K 16:9 displays.

With dynamic vadjust enabled, most titles will enjoy a nicely centered viewport at a perfect 5× scale using 1080p output resolution, by cropping the viewport to 216 lines. Games using more than 216 active video lines will instead get a perfect 4× scale by applying a 270 line crop.

MiSTer: CPU Performance Notes

The D-Cache option in MiSTer’s Amiga core is essentially a turbo switch for the CPU, making it perform on par with an accelerated Amiga with a Motorola 68030 CPU at 50MHz in many benchmarks. Unfortunately, running with it enabled introduces lots of subtle glitches in many (mostly older) games and demos, so it’s recommended is to leave it OFF by default.

The CPU D-Cache option is available in the OSD under the System menu.

On the other hand, some titles – mostly 3D polygon games and demos – will benefit greatly from the CPU boost D-Cache offers. So it’s an option worth experimenting with on a case by case basis.

Note that the glitches introduced with D-Cache on can sometimes clear up by turning it off while the Amiga core is running. Other times they seem to stick until reboot. The latter behavior is the case with, for example, Turrican II and Grand Monster Slam (and many less significant titles). Whenever making changes to the System settings in the OSD, we recommend re-loading the core.

Workbench

From the launcher, you can hit the ESC key to exit into Workbench, the AmigaOS graphical desktop environment.

You can explore the world’s first multitasking 16-bit computer from 1985 with the addition of a more modern desktop from 1992, AmigaOS 3.

To change from the default 640×200 resolution to something like 1280×720 or 1920×1080 for use with a 16:9 HD display, hold down the right mouse button and select your preferred resolution from the ScreenMode menu. 540p is a nice compromise, a very usable screen resolution that doubles every pixel on a modern 1080p/4K 16:9 display.

Non-working Games

About 10 games are currently not working due to CPU or graphics chipset features not yet implemented in MiSTer’s Minimig core. Over the past years compatibility has improved a lot, and that trend is likely to continue. A few titles do not work, or are very glitchy, due to other inaccuracies. This will also likely improve over time. The launcher will specify when a game is known not to work in the Notes section of a given game.

Custom Scripts

If you want to run additional scripts on startup, AmigaVision looks for a file named Saves:custom-startup on boot and runs it, so if you need to run scripts that will survive upgrades of the main image, this is where to put them.

As an example, here’s what you would add to Saves:custom-startup if you wanted to make changes to screen resolution, colors, pointers or any other Workbench setting copied from ENV:Sys/ (which is where Workbench settings are stored temporarily) to Saves:Custom/Prefs-Env/ before rebooting:

copy Saves:Custom/Prefs-Env ENV:Sys/

This will take the setting you copied to Saves:Custom/Prefs-Env and put them in RAM: when booting the image, so you can keep your own settings even when replacing the MegaAGS.hdf file with a future version. You can also install new apps/games to Saves: and add Assign statements etc to the Saves: drive, or do anything else you want to keep permanent after upgrading.

Bug Reports & Feature Requests

While AmigaVision has been tested for many years, the sheer volume of games and demos makes it all but certain that something has been overlooked somewhere. If you find something that doesn’t work or seems like it’s running with the wrong settings, or something is missing – tell us about it in the issue tracker found under the Development section at amiga.vision.

Credits

  • David Lindecrantz – Creator, original developer
  • Alex Limi – Developer, current maintainer
  • Per Olofsson – Creator of AGS, the launcher software
  • Ben Squibb – Improvements to AGS to enable hi-res launcher with thumbnail cycling + IFF conversion of hi-res thumbnails
  • hitm4n – Hi-resolution screenshots for demos
  • LamerDeluxe – MT-32 support
  • Frode Solheim – Creator of OpenRetro.org, screenshots used with kind permission

Troubleshooting

I get a bunch of errors when starting up!

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of variables in what could go wrong, but one useful thing to verify is to make sure the HDF file didn’t get corrupted on its way to the MiSTer, your Amiga or emulation setup. It’s a large file, and there’s a lot that can go wrong along the way. The reasons for this happening are legion, but among them:

  • You are using FTP to transfer the file, but your FTP client defaults to ASCII instead of binary transfers.
  • You are using SMB/Samba, but the implementation of your OS isn’t great, and might abort mid-write.
  • Your SD card has issues writing the file — very common with cheap or old SD cards.

Let’s make sure the image made it over to the target location intact.

The easiest — but a little bit time-consuming — is to compare SHA-1 checksums. MiSTer, Windows, Mac and Linux all have these tools installed by default, but you have to issue some command line instructions to make it work.

  1. Do a new, clean transfer of the HDF file to MiSTer — ideally not over the network, but if that’s your only option, go for it. The reason why you need to do this again is that if the Amiga does any writes to the HDF during earlier attempts to launch it, the checksum will be different, and useless for this purpose.
  2. Do a clean boot of your MiSTer, and press the F9 key on a keyboard connected to it. This will let you log in to the terminal. Username is root, and password is 1 unless you have changed it in the past.
  3. Run the following command, which will take 5-10 minutes to complete: shasum /media/fat/games/Amiga/MegaAGS.hdf
  4. It will report back a checksum, you will compare this to the checksum on your computer.

Depending on what operating system you are on, you will do one of the following:

  • If you are on macOS: Open the Terminal, and run the command: shasum /path/to/MegaAGS.hdf Compare this to the checksum you got on the MiSTer.

  • If you are on Windows: Open PowerShell, and run the command: Get-FileHash C:\path\to\MegaAGS.hdf -Algorithm SHA1 Compare this to the checksum you got on the MiSTer.

  • If you are on Linux: Open a terminal, and run the command: shasum /path/to/MegaAGS.hdf Compare this to the checksum you got on the MiSTer.

If these checksums do not match, something is wrong with either the way you transfer your file, or your SD card.

If they do match, launching should work without issues, assuming you don’t have a bad HDF file on your computer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you have Scanline and Shadow Mask presets by default?

The Amiga was almost exclusively used with RGB-based CRTs or consumer TVs, and graphics do not look correct without scanlines and shadow masks. We have included a set of Amiga-specific scanline and shadow mask setups to more accurately represent the graphics output of the system that we highly recommend.

Thus, the default setup is configured for this to make sure the most people see the most representative setup. Since configuring this can be intimidating to new users, we chose to have a default that we think best represents the Amiga’s original look.

You can of course set your own scanline and shadow mask presets and save those configurations if you don’t want to use ours.

If you are using resolutions lower than 1080p, 1440p or 1536p, we recommend turning them off, but since most users are on 1080p/4K TVs, equally capable monitors, they are on by default.

If you are using analog output to CRTs, these will of course not be used.

Should I worry about Amiga viruses?

In short: No.

Viruses on the Amiga were quite common, and some retail games even shipped with infected disks in the box.

Even though we don’t control what’s being used as inputs to the script that creates the AmigaVision image, pretty much all games and demos run inside WHDL containers, you can think of them as “virtualization for the Amiga”. Their job is to insulate the game from the rest of the system, reset CPU vectors, and other system state preservation. So even if a game or demo contains a virus, it cannot stay resident in memory, and will not spread to the rest of the system outside of the sandbox it has been given.

If you want to check the state of a given setup, or whether you have viruses in memory, just run the included VirusZ scanner in the System folder. Again, if you see virus warnings inside of WHDLoad containers, it’s nothing to worry about.

We check all files that are under our control for viruses before release.

I can’t get the game started from its title screen! Do I ever need to use “Joystick Swap” on the MiSTer?

Unless you are using the “Arcadia Systems” games (see below), no. On the Commodore 64, games sometimes used Port 1 and sometimes Port 2 for controlling games, necessitating this setting; but since the (Commodore) Amiga shipped with a mouse and it was always plugged into port 1, the main controller is pretty much always connected to port 2.

The MiSTer core will handle these mappings for you, and joystick port configuration is pretty much never the reason you can’t start or control a given game. It’s way more likely that you have to hit the space bar, F1, or click a mouse button to get the game started. If you’re stuck, look up the controls for a given game in an online manual – which is always a good idea anyway, as there are often additional keyboard or mouse controls needed for a given game for full enjoyment.

Does AmigaVision work with Kickstart 3.2?

While the standard AmigaVision setup expects Kickstart 3.1 — which was the last release from Commodore — we have had reports of the setup working if you replace icon.library and workbench.library with their respective Workbench 3.2 versions. The recommended and tested setup is still Kickstart 3.1.

Are there any plans to support original Amiga 500, Amiga 600, or Amiga 1000 hardware?

Not at the moment, AmigaVision is currently AGA-only and requires at least a 68020 processor. Unless you have added a fair bit of upgrades to these systems, using the AmigaVision setup would be an exercise in frustration, and we also don’t have the real hardware to test with when we do a release.

We welcome contributions, though — so if you’re interested in maintaining this part of the AmigaVision setup scripts, let us know!

What’s “Arcadia Systems”?

Arcadia was an unsuccessful venture by Mastertronic to create an Amiga 500 based multi-game arcade system. Most titles released for the system have been dumped and are available on the AmigaVision image. The games are not great (to put it kindly), but are an interesting curiosity.

Button mapping:

P1 Start:    F1
P2 Start:    F2
Left Coin:   F3
Right Coin:  F4
Config:      F5

Player 1 uses joystick port 1, while Amiga software universally expect mouse in port 1 and joystick in port 2. If using only one joystick, enable the “Joy Swap” option in the Chipset menu to route the first MiSTer joypad to port 1. It’s also worth noting that all Arcadia games make use of a 2-button joystick.

What are the details of the MiSTer configuration?

If you prefer to configure the main settings manually instead of using the included config files, these are the recommended settings:

df0: no disk
df1: no disk
Joystick Swap: OFF
Drives:
  A600/A1200 IDE: On
  Fast-IDE (68020): On
  Primary Master:
    Fixed/HDD
    games/Amiga/MegaAGS.hdf
  Primary Slave:
    Fixed/HDD
    games/Amiga/MegaAGS-Saves.hdf
  Secondary Master: Disabled
  Secondary Slave: Disabled
  Floppy Disk Turbo: Off
System:
  CPU: 68020
  D-Cache: OFF
  Chipset: AGA
  ChipRAM: 2M
  FastRAM: 384M
  SlowRAM: none
  Joystick: CD32
  ROM:
    games/Amiga/MegaAGS-Kickstart.rom
  HRTmon: disabled
Audio & Video:
  TV Standard: PAL
  Scandoubler FX: Off
  Video area by: Blank
  Aspect ratio: 40:27
  Pixel Clock: 28MHz
  Scaling: Normal
  RTG Upscaling: Normal
  Stereo mix: 50%
  Audio Filter: Auto(LED)
  Model: A500
  Paula Output: PWM