And so the idea was born to create a screensaver from a Youtube video. I really like the Amiga Longplay series at Youtube, where guys play old Amiga classic games. The videos show all of the game and have a playtime of many hours sometimes. I decided to download several of those videos, namely King of Chicago, Moonstone, Indiana Jones IV and Day of the Tentacle (PC) and create screensavers from them.

I’m using the Firefox Download Helper extension to download the videos from Youtube. You could also use Grab++ from Orbit Downloader or any other means of downloading the videos from Youtube. The videos are still in flv format and we need to use a converter to convert them to swf format.

I have been using a website called Media Convert to convert flv to swf files. It supports files with a size of up to 150 Megabyte.

If you prefer a offline application or have flv files with a size larger than 150 Megabyte you could use Super instead. Super is a media converter supporting most media file formats. It’s also a better idea if your upload speed is rather low.

Once the swf file has been created you can load Instant Storm and the creation of the screensaver from that Youtube video begins. The process is actually pretty straightforward. I have been using the Project Wizard which guides you to three steps.

The steps are to (1) name the screensaver, (2) select the swf file for it, (3) add a preview image if you like and (4) convert the swf file to the screensaver. A .exe file will be created which, when double-clicked, becomes the new screensaver for the system.

What I like about this solution is that you create a screensaver with video and sound. The process is really easy to follow through and you get some very nice results. It’s actually fun watching the screensaver for some time.

This technique is not limited to Youtube videos. You can basically convert any video files to swf files and create a screensaver from them using this method.

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The alternative is emulation. Winuae is a great Amiga emulator, it´s free and easy to use once you get used to it. (*nix version, mac version, psp version) The difficult part is that you will need a kickstart rom to run amiga software. The only legal source that sells kickstart roms is the amiga forever compilation. A quick search on google revealed that several download sites offer downloads of kickstart roms. This is illegal and I advise against it. Once you got your kickstart rom you are ready to go..

Wait, something is missing: The games. Amiga games are available in .adf format which uae is able to read and run. Some famous company’s like Cinemaware are offering disk images of their amiga games for free on their websites. You can download games like Defender of the Crown, Wings, It came from the Desert, Rocket Ranger and many more by simply visiting their site and creating a user account. Once you´ve downloaded some disks you should start uae and do the following.

You need to configure uae the way that it knows where the amiga kickstart rom file is located. I suggest you create a subdirectory called kickstart in the uae folder and place all kickstart roms there. Click the rom tab and select your kickstart rom file as the main rom. (for amiga 500 and 2000 emulation this should be kickstart 1.3)

Click on quick start afterwards, then select disk image from floppy drive df0. Remember that the early amiga computers had no hard drive, everything was run from floppy disks. Browse to the disk image and double click it, the path and name should be displayed now. If the game has more than one disk repeat the process for df1. You are able to access four floppy drives by clicking on floppy drives in the configuration. Some games need even more (monkey island for example was delivered on nine floppy disks, imagine that.)

The last thing you need to do is to click start to start the emulation process. The emulator will run in a windows mode unless you´ve chosen to run in full screen. If loading times are slow you can speed up floppy load time which should work fine for most games. (up to 800%) Some games can be downloaded as hard drive versions which should also speed up loading times.

Some impressions of running games:

Last but not least. Do I think it is worth to use this emulator and pay for a kickstart rom ? Yes I do. Even though most games look bad when it comes to graphics and sound bad as well they are still great. They are fun to play and maybe some may even bring back some long lost childhood memories. Of a time when games were just games.

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The game was using vector graphics and someone decided that it would be a nice idea to scale the vectors to offer a high res version of the game. You can see and download the results at the another world fanpage. Downloads are only available for pc but that should not be a problem for most. (with the Amiga system being nearly dead and all)

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