Introduction¶
Welcome RML Amiga (Rincewind’s Magic Luggage Full of Amiga Goodies), a curated collection of (mostly) cerebral Amiga games! Adventures, RPGs, simulators, strategy, board and puzzle games are the stars of the show, but a small number of arcade classics have also been included.
The aim of this collection is to recreate the Original Authentic Experience™ of sitting in front of a real Commodore Amiga connected to a classic 15 kHz Commodore CRT monitor, playing the uncracked and unaltered originals. Manuals, reference cards, interactive code wheels, maps, posters, box art, audio recordings, hint books, and various other extras to enjoy the games to the fullest are all included.
No previous Amiga experience is assumed or required—things are kept as simple as possible, and everything you need to know is explained in this manual.
Wait a minute, you said “uncracked originals”? Does this mean I’ll need to use floppies and put up with disk swapping and long loading times? No! Contrary to popular belief, the majority of big multi-disk releases are hard drive installable. Luckily for us, that’s most RPGs and adventure games.
About 70% of the games in the collection run from an emulated hard drive. Most of the remaining floppy games require either no disk swapping (because they support multiple drives), or only minimal disk swapping. Moreover, most floppy-only releases load rather quickly, and you can always put the emulator in “warp mode” to speed up the loading.
Features in detail¶
- Authentic experience
- Every single game has been painstakingly set up for an optimal and authentic experience. The primary goal is to run unaltered originals on the systems they were developed for, which is a stock or expanded Amiga 500 for most titles. A small number of titles run on an emulated Amiga 1200, Amiga CD32, or Commodore CDTV.
- Native hard drive installations
- Hard drive installations are preferred for games that natively support it. That’s most big American releases and many European RPG, adventure, and strategy titles. Also, quite a few games that don’t have official HD installers can be persuaded to run from a hard drive with a little Amiga knowledge. 70% of the games in the collection run from the hard drive.
- No more bad cracks
- An overarching theme of the collection is “no hacks allowed!” For games designed to run from floppies, the original floppy images are preferred with the disk-based protection intact. Cracks, hacks, WHDLoad, and other fan-made content are generally avoided and are only used as a last resort. For the rare cracked versions, every effort was taken to confirm the game is completable. No more worrying about bad cracks in those 40+ hour RPGs!
- Optimal configurations
- Some games benefit from faster CPUs or extra memory (e.g., they might show more varied graphics or have more music and sound effects in the presence of extra RAM). Then some games assume very specific configurations and start exhibiting strange bugs if their expectations are not met. Figuring this out for each game is tricky as it requires in-depth Amiga knowledge or manual and forum diving—usually all of the above, and this can be tedious even for Amiga gurus. The good news is you don’t have to worry about any of that; all games have been configured to give you the most they have to offer.
- Play floppy games like a boss
- Every floppy game comes pre-configured to use multiple floppy drives if the game supports it. This means zero or vastly reduced disk swapping. Blank save disks are also provided for each game as creating them is often tedious and error-prone (some games use special save disk formats).
- Authentic CRT monitor emulation
- Pixel art drawn and intended to be viewed on 15 kHz Commodore CRT monitors looks outright broken on modern flat screens with the pixels displayed as razor-sharp little rectangles. A CRT shader setup is included that authentically recreates the look of PAL and NTSC Commodore monitors people typically used their Amigas with. All monitor resolutions from 1080p to 5K and beyond are supported.
- PAL/NTSC & aspect ratio correctness
- All games are correctly set up for PAL or NTSC, including getting the aspect ratio right while prioritising developer intent. No more playing American releases with squashed graphics and 20% slower music or gameplay! Moreover, PAL games that assume “NTSC stretch” are correctly set up, too (these are typically Atari ST ports and European multi-platform releases).
- Quality-of-life save states
- Some games subject you to a manual-based protection check at the start, have an unskippable intro sequence, or might take a really long time to load from floppies. For these games, the collection provides save states taken right after the protection check or the intro as a quality-of-life enhancement. One less excuse for using questionable cracks and hacks!
- All necessary information included
- Manuals, reference cards, interactive code wheels, maps, posters, box art, audio recordings, hint books, and various other extras to enjoy the games to the fullest are all included. Quite a few games are next to impossible to play without these materials. Significant effort has been taken to track down the best-looking scanned copies for each game.
- Preserving custom Workbench screens
- A handful of games feature beautifully designed icons and Workbench screens with custom colour schemes (Workbench is the graphical user interface of AmigaOS). These works of art are worth preserving, and to date, RML Amiga is the only game collection that attempts to do so.
- Curated demoscene collection
- The Amiga was (and still is) famous for its vibrant demoscene in Europe. Demos are non-interactive audiovisual pieces of art created by Amiga enthusiasts (traditionally teenagers) that showcase their coding and artistic prowess and push the limits of what the machine is capable of. Many elite-level programmers and artists of today had been forged in the fires of the early Amiga demoscene. The collection includes a modest selection of demos, with the eventual goal of including all demos presented in the prestigious editions64k Amiga demoscene book series (and then some more!)
Hardware requirements¶
RML Amiga has been developed and tested on Windows 10 64-bit. It will most likely work fine on more recent Windows versions, and probably on Windows 7 64-bit, too. Only 64-bit Windows versions are supported.
The CRT shader setup works on any monitor resolution, from 1080p to 5K and beyond. A variable refresh rate (VRR), adaptive-sync display (e.g., Nvidia G-Sync or AMD FreeSync capable) is highly recommended. Fixed-refresh rate monitors will work fine, too, but it can be a bit more hassle to minimise input lag in action games with vsync enabled on such displays. If you only care about slower-paced games (e.g., RPGs, adventures) and watching demos, a fixed-refresh monitor will work great.
A middle-tier or better CPU released in the last ten years or so is recommended. A dedicated GPU is the best, but integrated graphics adapters will likely work, too; you only might need to lower the CRT shader quality (see the Customising your setup section for details).
On copyright and ethics¶
All games in this collection have been out of commercial circulation for at least three decades. If it wasn’t for the exemplary efforts of the Software Preservation Society (SPS) (formerly known as the Classic Amiga Preservation Society (CAPS)) and the larger Amiga community, all those original floppy disks would be unreadable by now and 99% of these games would be lost forever.
The goal of this collection is not to advocate piracy or to strip creators of their livelihood, but to make these games not available via any commercial channels accessible and playable for old-school Amiga fans and the next generation of gamers alike.
For this reason, the collection will never include any recent Amiga games that are still sold commercially out of respect to their creators. This is non-negotiable.
The collection is supposed to be shared freely; selling it for profit is considered extremely bad taste and is in no way endorsed by the creators of RML Amiga. Don’t do this!
All games in the collection are copyright of their respective owners.