The Commodore Project. Prologue - Installing AmigaOS 3.2 in 2024

Introduction

As a child of the 70’s and 80’s I grew up as the home computer was becoming a thing. Meaning when I was really young the home computer wasn’t a thing and it became a thing as I grew up. The home computer grew up with me. Which means I grew up at the exact right time. Because For as long as I can remember I have been interested in computers and tech.

Today, when the home computer is ubiquitous, I still have a particular fondness for the computers of my childhood. In particular the Commodore line of machines and more specifically the Amiga computers.

Unlike today there was a great variety of joyously incompatible and competing machines on the market. Of course it could never last, but for a period in the 80’s and 90’s there was a veritable zoo of home computers available all vying for attention. Computer shops stocked all manner of brands like Acorn, Commodore, Atari, Apple, Sinclair … to name but a few. The future was arriving at home and we were spoilt for choice. Budgets permitting! Of course I never owned all the Commodore machines back then. That would be impossible! But now…

Retro Resurgence

All grown up but many years ago now I set my mind to collecting as many of the Commodore computers as possible, At the time most of them were acquirable for less than £100 (at the very top end) on eBay. So my goal was to achieve a childhood dream and own as many of them as possible and that I did. I bought them, admired them then shoved them in the loft. Always planning to do something with them.

In recent years there has been somewhat of a resurgence of interest in Retro Computers and this triggered me to think about what to do with my collection. I have begun to go through them and restore them to fully working condition. This is a project I am calling ‘The Commodore Project’ and will create a bunch of content off the back of it.

This article is a prologue to work on that project and it serves as a reference for me and others. This article documents how to install AmigaOS. It can be applied to both emulated and physical hardware.

Because of the interest in Retro Computers there is a ton of hardware and software available as well as amazing content on YouTube and the web. However I have often needed to jump around to find things for reference for my purposes. So this article serves as a single point of reference for the required steps for installing AmigaOS.

AmigaOS 3.2

The last official release of Amiga OS from Commodore was AmigaOS 3.1 in 1994 it shipped with the CD32, Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 machines. Since then various other incarnations of the OS have been created such as the variously versioned 3.5,3.9, 4.0 and 4.1. releases. However all of these depart in some way from the original OS and often don’t support all of the vintage Amiga’s. They seem to mostly be attempts to modernise and repurpose the OS. Which isn’t really my bag.

In 2018 Hyperion Entertainment, who through some mechanism acquired the rights and source code to the Amiga 3.1 OS (maybe another day I’ll try to write up what happened with Commodore post the glory days) released AmigaOS 3.1.4, which included bugfixes and enhancements to 3.1 using the original source code. Which meant it ran on all the original Amiga’s. In 2021 Hyperion released a further update, AmigaOS 3.2 which adds further enhancements and quality of life fixes. 3.2.2, the latest update was released in 2023.

Still based off the 1994 3.1 source code, AmigaOS 3.2 runs on all the vintage hardware and retains the look and feel of the original OS (for better or worse!).

Clearly a passion project, AmigaOS 3.2 is a hobbist OS for retro Amiga Hardware and its the one I’ll use for this article. Having said that, most of the detail here will apply to the 3.1 and even 2.x. versions alike.

AmigaOS 3.2 is distributed by various Retro Computing stores on the Web. If I recall correctly, I got my copy from RetroPassion Along with the kickstart ROMS for my Amiga 1200, 500 and 4000.

Helpfully, on the CD the OS is shipped on, a dump of the Kickstart ROM’s (the bootstrap firmware the Amiga requires to boot the system) is provided and Amiga Disk Format (ADF) images of the installation disks. Making it super easy to use with emulators and modern floppy emulation hardware like a GoTek Drive.

This article assumes you have access to the OS Install source and ROM images.

Lets go!

Emulation - FS-UAE Prep

For this article I am using the FS-UAE emulator on my M1 Mac. This is a version of the Unix Amiga Emulator (UAE), as it was originally named, but now the Universal Amiga Emulator apparently. FS-UAE was created by Frode Solheim (the FS).

I have found FS-UAE to be nicely implemented, stable and reliable. There are official versions for Mac, Windows and Linux. Because it uses UAE under the hood, these instructions are most likely adaptable to other UAE implementation like WinUAE. Although I haven’t tested with anything other than FS-UAE so your millage may vary. Of course the OS installation instructions are generically applicable regardless of UAE implementation chosen.

Using emulation makes it easier to grab screenshots and quickly iterate on configs. It’s great to use as a ‘Digital Twin’ for real Amiga’s when you need to quickly test things. In any case these instructions work just fine on a real Amiga. However I would suggest using the aforementioned GoTek Drive to make the floppy disk swapping easier.

First I’ll walk through the basic setup of the emulator to get the system ready for the OS Install. Then I’ll step through the OS install followed by instructions for setting up the retargetable graphics option.

FS-UAE Basic Config

(Click the images to enlarge)

The image below shows the Home tab on the FS-UAE launcher. I choose the Amiga 4000 hardware model with the 3.1 ROM (3.2 wasn’t available natively in the version I used).

Another important change to make here is to change the Joystick setting to the No Host Device option. This releases the cursor keys in the emulator so they can be used normally. For games, obviously we’d want to map a Joystick.

Next on the Rom & Ram tab, I set the Kickstart ROM to the Kickstart 3.2 rom image for the Amiga 4000. I choose 2Mb Chip RAM and 8Mb Fast Ram

On the Expansions Tab set the Graphics Card to UAEGFX. This setting adds a virtual retargetable graphics adapter to the emulator which will allow us to setup higher resolution graphics modes later.

Also select and enable the UAE bsdsocket.library. This injects a networking library into the OS via the emulator that allows us to do some networking when we might need it.

Optionally at this point we can start the emulator to see if rom and ram settings are ok. Save the configuration then click the Start button.

This should result in the Kickstart screen showing and waiting for a floppy.

Note that this spawns the emulator process. In order to exit simply quit the emulator (Command-Q on the Mac), it wont close the config/UI application.

Continuing prepping for installing AmigaOS, move onto the Floppy Drive tab. For the first floppy slot, use the button on the right of the text box to browse to the AmigaOS 3.2 ADF images and select the Install 3.2.adf image. This will insert the disk image in floppy device 0 (DF0) and boot from it.

Also on the floppy tab its really important to add the rest of the OS adf images to the Media Swap List do this by using the + button to browse for and add all the AmigaOS3.2 adf images to the list. This allows us to swap between OS install disks during the installation.

Because we want to configure a least one of the hard disks on this emulated Amiga as if it were a real SCSI disk, we first need to create an Amiga Hard Disk Format (HDF) file which will act as the SCSI HDD device. We need to do this before we make changes on the Hard Drives tab.

To create the HDF file, access the drop down menu on the Amiga Tick logo button on the left hand side of the window, and choose the HDF Creator option. As shown in the figure below.

This opens the HDF Disk Image Creator window (below). Choose the HDF - Partitionable Hard Drive Image (RDB) option. This creates an Amiga Rigid Disk Block image that will be presented via the emulator as a SCSI device.

Give it a name and a size. Really doesn’t need to be large. The biggest Amiga HDD’s back in the 90’s were in the hundreds of megabytes.

Note: I have found that changing the destination for the hdf file crashes the UI. Best just leave it at the default location and move the file after to wherever you want it.

For the config shown I have created one RDB HDF based drive image (WBScsi) and two single partition images (Games and Apps) and created a fourth (Archives) which uses a directory on my Mac HDD.

It is worth setting up at least one HDD using a directory as the backing storage as this will allow you to transfer data in and out of the emulated Amiga easily. i.e. simply copy files into the directory that the emulator is using as the HDD.

For simplicity of explanation of the AmigaOS setup I will disconnect the other three drives from the emulator and focus only on the main system drive (WBScsi), configuring the other drive images is a simple matter of formatting them (see below) and the Archives directory based HD will be available as is in the OS with no need to do anything.

AmigaOS Installation

At this point, the emulator is setup and ready to go for the OS install. Save the config and click the Start Button

The emulator will boot off the install floppy image and into Workbench 3.2

Notice that none of the HDD’s show up on the workbench screen. This would be the case on a real Amiga. The hard disk needs to be setup first.

Opening the Install 3.2 disk reveals the HD Tools drawer (AmigaOS terminology for a directory in the UI). Inside of the HD Tools drawer we see the HDToolBox application.

Important! Before launching HDToolBox we have to tell it which SCSI device to use. Because we are using an emulated SCSI device we need to change the default setting before launching the app. To do this click the HDToolBox application to select it, then hold the right mouse button and go to the Icons Menu and select the Information menu item.

This brings up the information that is passed to the application when it launches.

In the Tool types textbox the SCSI_DEVICE_NAME setting will show scsi.device. We need to change that to be uaehf.device Click Save to save the configuration and close the window.

The device drivers for the emulated hardware are provided by the UAE emulator software directly. Meaning there is nothing we need to copy to the emulated Amiga in order for the emulated SCSI adapter to work. This is very neat and very convenient.

Now we can launch HDToolBox. When it starts, HDToolBox scans the SCSI bus looking for devices. The RDB drive should show up as status Unknown with no drive type on Address 0 and LUN 0.

We need to change the drive type. Select the drive and click the Change Drive Type button. This will show a window with no drive types defined.

Click the Define New button to define a new drive type.

On the Edit Drive Types screen, click the Read Configuration button. This will read the drive configuration from the device.

Important! We may need to manually change the File Name here. There is a bug where the file name isn’t updated and the application doesn’t like the default name. I named mine UAESCSI.

Once done, click Ok to exit the device type configuration and Ok again to go back to the main HDToolBox screen.

Next we need to partition the drive. Click the Partition Drive button.

For me, this part is a little confusing but at this stage it doesn’t matter if we screw up because we can simply redo the partitioning.

The system defaults to having a configuration with the drive partitioned exactly in half. For this configuration we are going to delete the two proposed partitions and get back to a state where we have all unused space. Select each partition and click Delete Partition

Next create a new partition and drag the blue arrow all the way to the right to configure it to use all the disk. I like to name this device DH0, in keeping with original Amiga hardware.

Click Ok to exit the partitioning screen.

On the main window click Save Changes this will let you know that clicking Continue will reboot the Amiga.

After the reboot we will see a new disk icon on the workbench screen DH0:Uninitialized

The next part might be a little unintuitive to Windows and Mac users of today. To format the drive we don’t use the HDToolBox application as you may expect, rather we select DH0: then hold the right mouse button and once again go to the Icons menu. From here select the Format disk item

I like to call the disk where I install the OS System. Once named, click Format

After TWO warnings it will format the disk

On completion of the format we will have an initialised system disk with a Trashcan setup.

Now we are ready to install AmigaOS 3.2!

Open the Install3.2 disk again and open the Installer drawer. Then launch the installer in the language of your choice.

Select the top option to install the OS. GlowIcons will be installed as part of the installation process but we will have an option later to say we don’t want them (due to memory constraints). This option can be used if we say no and later we decide we do want GlowIcons.

We will use the CPU Support Library option later.

Soon enough we will be required to swap install disks. This is where having all the OS disks in our swap list is required.

On FS-UAE on the Mac you can swap disks by pressing F12 to bring up the Emulator config and settings screen. Use the cursor keys to navigate down to the Removable Media section an hit Enter on the item that shows Install3.2.adf

This will bring up the available media to swap into DF0:. i.e. the list of ADF’s we included in the media swap options. Browse to the disk image the installed is asking for and select it then exit settings options.

Continue swapping in disks as the installer asks for them. At the end of the install the installer will note that we have a 32-bit CPU and ask us to reboot to complete the install. Exit the installer and restart the emulator as required. Leaving the install floppy image mounted in DF0:

Once the system restarts, re-run the installer as per the step above. This time select the Install CPU Support Libraries option and proceed.

Choose the Other option when asked for the manufacturer of the CPU card. This will install the default CPU support libraries.

Once installed. Quit the emulator. Before restarting browse to the floppy drive tab in the UI and eject the install disk from DF0:

Restart the emulator to boot from the HDD and into a fresh install of AmigaOS

Now this doesn’t look great does it? Don’t worry we can make it look much better without to much effort. So lets finish the install by setting up ReTargetable Graphics (RTG) via the emulated graphics card expansion.

ReTargetable Graphics and Picasso96

Before we do anything else, lets remove the Workbench window border. I feel the Amiga looks cleaner without it. Hold the Right Mouse Button down and navigate to the Workbench menu. Then select the Backdrop Item and this will make the window border go away.

Above in the emulator setup section we chose the UAEGFX graphics card. This can be used to enable different screen modes at higher resolutions with more colour options. In order to enable the card, RTG software libraries are required. The most common of these is the Picasso96 package available on AmiNet.

Picasso96 is shareware, however I have not noticed any limitations in terms of functionality when using it with UAE. Licensing the package doesn’t appear to be possible at the moment, but if you own Amiga Forever you may already have a license.

The Picasso96 software from Aminet is archived using the LHA archive format, so the lha compression tool is also required to extract the archive. This is also available on aminet as a self extracting archive.

Once Picasso96 and lha are downloaded, copy them to the directory used as the storage for the Archives drive mentioned above. This will make them available within the emulated OS. Open the Archives drive on the Amiga and you will see the two archives.

Rather than extracting the archives using the icons, we will use the Amiga Shell

Open the System Drive and open the System Folder. The Shell program should be top left.

Run the shell program and enter archives: to change to the Archives drive then issue the dir command to review the contents of the Archives Drive

Next run the lha.run program. This extracts the self extracting lha archive which contains processor optimised versions of the lha utility. This is a command line tool so next we copy it to the C: assign the default path for AmigaOS shell tools. Copying lha to C: will put in the system path meaning we can execute it from any directory. To copy the correct version run the command line: copy lha_68040 C: This will copy the tool to C: as lha.

Now we can extract the Picasso96 archive. To do this issue the command: lha x Picasso96.lha This will extract Picasso96 in the current directory.

For now we are done with the shell. It can be closed. Navigate back to the Archives drive. Either close the Archives drive window and reopen it or select Update from the Window Menu to refresh the icons. You should see the icons for the lha tools and a new drawer called Picasso96Install

Open the Picasso96Install drawer and run the Setup program to begin setting up Picasso96. Ensure the First Install option is selected and click Proceed

Select the Intermediate User option and click Proceed

Amiga setups are quite verbose at times. Yes we want to Install for real. Click Proceed

Accept all the defaults and keep clicking proceed. Eventually we will reach the option to Read the documentation. Feel free to do so or click No to carry on.

We’ll get to the screen where we choose the cards we want to use with with Picasso96. Select the uaegfx option that should be available since that is the card we have installed. Click Proceed to continue.

Next we’ll be asked where we want to install the various components of the software. Click the default location for each choice.

Yet another screen where we get a final choice to install the software. Click Yes to continue.

Nearly done! We get asked if we want to install the P96_PrinterPatch. I have found this seems to cause annoying popups during the OS startup and since I don’t intend to use a printer, I choose No here

We get a final screen showing the options we selected and we get a last chance to abort. Note in the screenshot I have chosen all the default locations. Click Yes to install Picasso96

There is a nice affordance here at the end of the install where the installer sets up all the device tooltypes automatically for us. Click Proceed on these and the installer will configure our device drivers to work with UAE and Picasso96 nicely.

Finally we are done with the install.

At this point you may want to restart the Amiga to ensure all the devices and drivers are loaded in correctly.

After a reboot the next step is to put the graphics card to use. Open the System Drive open Prefs and find the Screen Mode tool.

Helpfully, UAE injects a set of new screen modes into the emulator for us so we don’t need to use the Picasso96 tools to create them as we would on a real Amiga.

You should see a number of new UAE modes available. Choose one that suits and click Test

This will show the screen test pattern and ensure the mode works with our configuration.

Once satisfied, click Save to use and save this option. This will reset the screen mode to a gloriously higher resolution.

But notice the background picture doesn’t look the best in this new resolution. Lets fix that. Open Prefs again from the System Drive and launch the WB Pattern tool.

Click the Select Picture button to bring up the file dialog allowing us to pick a new picture. Chose the size that matches your chosen screen resolution.

Important Note: You may get a message saying the image you chose can’t be loaded. This is because our Amiga only has a few megabytes of memory available, not enough to load the higher resolution png for the background image. You can either stick with the lower res picture or shutdown the Amiga and adjust the memory in the emulator, giving the emulated machine more memory.

Finally! We now have a beautiful high resolution Amiga running Amiga OS3.2. Now we can proceed on a nostalgic journey running all that sweet Amiga software!

Conclusion

I hope this comprehensive guide is of use to old and new Amiga fans and enables you all to enjoy the full Amiga experience.

I’ll be adding more Commodore content over the next few months as the Commodore Project proceeds.

If you did get some use out of this and are feeling generous, please feel free to drop me a dime or two on KoFi via the link below.