Amiga Forever Manifesto

The Amiga team at Cloanto, developers of Amiga applications since 1986, released the first version of Amiga Forever in 1997. These were difficult times for the Amiga market (which had been declining for years) and for emulation software in general (for legal reasons, which Cloanto was among the first to address).

1997 looked like the start of a new chapter for a group of long-time CBM/Amiga friends. More than 20 years later, continuity and preservation have become a life mission that has already lasted longer than the original Commodore-Amiga era it was aiming to celebrate.

Systems like Windows 95 and Windows XP, and the 68K and PowerPC versions of Mac OS may have been more popular than the Amiga OS of its days, but they have long been unsupported by their respective companies, whether that be in terms of emulation and virtualization solutions, or in terms of availability of installation media. Not so for the Amiga OS (or its 8-bit CBM predecessors), which has already enjoyed more than 30 years of uninterrupted official support, covering both emulation and "real" systems.

The Amiga Forever project remains true to the original goals:

• To allow a maximum of original ("legacy") Amiga software and data to remain accessible and usable on modern hardware and operating systems
• To keep supporting "classic" Amiga systems
• To allow for easy data sharing and conversion between Amiga and other systems
• To allow Amiga hardware emulation to be legal, with respect and support for various emulation, operating system and application developers and users
• To maintain and extend an active portfolio of permissions and licenses to keep publishing original ROM and operating system components (even where the original licenses had expired)
• To allow new users to experience the original Amiga system
• To research, preserve and make accessible Amiga history and culture
• To provide continued support to all users of our original Amiga software titles
• To allow new generations to appreciate the Commodore/Amiga past, also from an educational angle
• To keep staying in touch with our Amiga Friends

The Amiga Forever series always included different operating system versions, running on a low-level emulation of the original Amiga hardware, or natively on "real" hardware. Such a complex project includes constant internal development, hundreds of external contributions, licenses and updates, a high-bandwidth web and download system, technical support to both Amiga users who never used a PC and to PC users who never used an Amiga, and much more. This is time consuming and expensive, and nobody is getting rich out of it. To the contrary, our efforts are in part "subsidized" by other projects and products, from which they also take away precious resources. This sometimes leads to discussions about how things could be done differently. Passion always tends to prevail.

Also, we have to admit that we are not always completely satisfied with the quality of certain details, or about some goals we missed in the current version, or about a few web pages which at some point are not up to date, or about the time it may take to answer some questions. Part of this is inevitable, not only because Amiga Forever would not be possible without open source and other components to which we try to contribute, but which are not under our control, but also because our own resources are limited, as is public interest. At the same time, we try to be as open as possible about this, for example by promptly disclosing known issues and limitations in the FAQ and Troubleshooting sections. And we keep working to constantly improve things.

The AmigaForever.com website, which is also maintained by Cloanto's passionate team of Amiga developers and users, aims to be a site dedicated to "Classic" Amiga culture and support, even for non-Amiga Forever users. More recently, we focused our continued effort and experience into the broader RetroPlatform context, where we are trying to reuse as many shared components as possible, so as to make both Amiga Forever and similar projects more sustainable and always up-to-date.

All of this would not be possible without your continued support.

Thank You!