A: The goal of the emulation software included with Amiga Forever is to fully emulate the Amiga hardware, including the original Amiga custom chips, in software. On top of this hardware emulation Amiga Forever runs the original Amiga operating system (not an emulation). Different versions of the Amiga operating system are provided for additional compatibility (e.g. some older games require Workbench 1.3). This means that, as a general rule, all Amiga software runs in the emulation.

Instead of publishing a "compatibility list" with would be nothing else than a list of thousands of Amiga programs ever released, we prefer to offer you a satisfaction guarantee: if you are not fully satisfied with Amiga Forever you can obtain a refund (as offered online from the Amiga Forever Homepage, third-party vendor limitations may apply). Also, should you ever experience compatibility issues with a specific program we would appreciate it if you could provide appropriate feedback, so that the emulation software and configuration can be improved.

The main limitation of the emulation software is that Amiga hardware cannot physically be emulated on a non-Amiga computer. In practice, this means that:

• Amiga-formatted floppy disks cannot be read without additional hardware. This can be solved as described here.
• Amiga hardware peripherals which require Amiga-specific hardware interfaces (e.g. Amiga version of Video Toaster or other Zorro-standard boards, parallel port audio devices, etc.) cannot be attached to the PC. This can be solved by using the corresponding PC-specific hardware. This requires specific PC software, if not directly supported by the emulation.
• Amiga software requiring a copy protection dongle (e.g. certain versions of Superbase and Scala) will not work, because the dongle itself cannot be attached to the PC. This problem, which may affect even a "real" Amiga where a dongle cannot be used because both joystick/mouse ports are already in use, can be solved by using the same software without copy protection, either as provided by the publisher or using a "hacked" version with permission of the publisher.

One of the original limitations affecting early Amiga emulation software was that, while the original Amiga chip set (OCS) was relatively well-documented (registers, timing, etc.), the more complex AGA chip set was also less documented, and certain AGA-specific features could not be completely emulated. With the evolution of Amiga emulation software, this has been largely resolved. In Amiga Forever this is further mitigated by the inclusion of an RTG (Amiga retargetable graphics) implementation.

Related Links

• Limitations of Amiga Forever
• Reading Amiga Floppy Disks on PC
• Speed of Amiga Emulation
• ROM and Operating System Files in Amiga Forever
• Amiga Forever and "Amiga OS 3.5" and "Amiga OS 3.9"
• Amiga Emulation Software: Integration vs. Isolation and Amiga Forever vs. Other Packages