Amiga Forever and C64 Forever 9 are now available
Remember the Commodore home computers C-64 and Amiga? Commodore hardware was highly popular back in the 80s and early 90s, but several bad business decisions brought an end to the company. Still, there are plenty of people out there that look back with fond memories, and others who may be curious about gaming or programming on these old machines.
While you can purchase C-64 and Amiga hardware and software on places such as eBay, emulation is an option as well. WinUAE is probably the best Amiga emulator out there, but it does require Kickstart ROMs to function.
One way of obtaining these ROMs legally, is to purchase the official Amiga Forever emulation package.
Amiga Forever 9 and C64 Forever 9 ship with everything that users need to get started. Both products are available in different versions.
The value edition of Amiga Forever 9 is available for $9.95 as a downloadable installer for Windows. It includes Kickstarter 1.3 and Workbench, and includes 25 included games and demoscene productions.
The Plus edition includes more Kickstart ROMs, including version 3.0, as well as more games and demoscene productions.
The Premium Edition is a physical one, with download options, and it caters to collectors for the most part as it includes lots of video content.
C64 Forever 9 is available in three editions as well: a free edition with limited features, a Plus edition with options to create a CD, and a Boxed Plus edition for collectors.
Amiga Forever 9 and C64 Forever 9 come with a number of enhancements over previous versions. The developers list the main features on the official website:
Version 9 celebrates beautiful new visual features like Arcade mode, Tile mode, light vs. dark options, and a first set of more colorful skin variants. Under the hood, hardware-accelerated technologies like Direct2D are used to provide a snappy experience. Powerful new column and tile field selection and sort options provide unprecedented control within the player interface, while a new property handler and an enhanced preview handler enable seamless content access via File Explorer and Windows Search.
The new version features new automation options to run scripts or applications on startup, and only the beginning of upcoming automation features.
Both packages include games, and the websites link to other, legal, resources, to obtain more games, demoscene productions, and applications.
Cloanto, the company behind the product, is working on a Mac version. The packages do include GNU/Linux binaries of UAE, the amiga emulator, so that emulation works on Linux as well out of the box, albeit not with the company's own Amiga Forever application.
Now You: Do you emulate older systems to relive childhood memories, or do you prefer physical hardware? If you had to name one C64 and one Amiga game, your favorite of all time, what would it be?
It’s valid in india or not?
I bought yesterday amiga forever and is amazing!!! Is very easy to use. Only with see the potraits of mu favourite games in the menu make me happy.
Amiga forever is the emulator that I was dreaming for my old amiga 500. Thanks for the developers because you make happy a lot of people like me that will always remember amiga 500 in my heart. Thanks.
Thanks for this article.
Love these retro emulation topics. I started with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 then 95 so I don’t know any game or computing platforms before this and it’s great to see we can run games or apps made for them today.
Amiga Benefactor C64 Commando,
For me best Commodore 64 game was Lords of Midnight
The ROM is “Kickstart” not “Kickstarter”.
Nice article Martin.
You are stating in the comments above that:
“On C64, it was Pirates, a wonderful open world game set in the Caribbean.”
Is that why you like the tv series Death in paradise so much? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1888075/
For me it’s still the one and only game (Chess and checkers are no games to me) I ever liked.
Loderunner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner
You can now play it without a Commodore c-64 at http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/
I am sorry to rain on the topic,
I was greatly influenced by Henri Kashmir Fabre, Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles Robert Darwin, and Carl Edward Sagan, and was enthusiastic about observing “nature (living things)” and “celestial bodies.”
I preferred the outdoors to the indoors.
This sensibility is unabated, and I am fascinated by the wonder of all things (nature and life).
Well, the natural world is going to hell as we speak, so escaping into a virtual one is preferable at this point.
i use fs-uae on linux and it runs great.
Secret of monkey island and all the cinemaware titles are my favourites among others.
i still have 2 amiga500s in their original boxes and they are for posterity although i tend to use the emulator most of the time.
fantastic computer.
Let me start with my favorite games.
On C64, it was Pirates, a wonderful open world game set in the Caribbean.
On Amiga, I can’t really make up my mind: Secret of Monkey Islands, Lemmings, Civilization, Wings or Moonstone are just some of the titles that I enjoyed the most.
Paradroid any day!
I’m not sure what the game was for the Amiga. It was SO long ago but I can describe it, It started with a few characters jumping out of a plane, you had to safely traverse your way to the bottom of a skyscraper and then it became a platformer as you ascended.
That and a Scene hack of Turrican that was super fun.
Based jumpers
I liked the old C64 and Amiga RPGs like Wasteland, Bard’s Tale, SSI D&D series, Neuromancer. These games along with Ultima were the basis for PC RPGs and open world games still being played today.