Amiga Forever

I’ve always been a die-hard Commodore Amiga computer fan.  So, when Cloanto started offering the Amiga Forever software emulation package, I knew I’d have to dabble with it.  I’ve been playing with Amiga Forever for a few years now, and just recently grabbed their latest version, Amiga Forever 2008.

I’ve always liked the feel of that old Amiga software.  Today it seems like you have to fight with too many technicalities and jump through too many hoops just to accomplish some basic tasks.  Amiga software was pretty intuitive.  It just worked.

To see if I could dust off that old knowledge and put it to some use I decided to see if I could somehow take an image that my wife had just taken with her new digital camera and import it into DeluxePaintIV, a classic Amiga painting program by Electronic Arts.

The trickiest part was getting the image into the standard Amiga Interchange File Format.  I had to find the plugin on an Adobe Photoshop CD and copy it manually into the plugins directory.  Exporting the picture right off the bat didn’t work, as DeluxePaint said it was a “mangled” IFF file.  So, I fired up a newer, but still Amiga-based graphics program that came with Amiga Forever, saved the file as an IFF in that program, and the picture finally loaded in DeluxePaint, as you see above.