The Backroad to Civilization

December 27th, 2013:

	We "enjoyed" a slow day at work today - we were one of only a 
handful of companies in the city who didn't take today off!  I was left 
with a lot of time to kill, and I chose to spend that time monkeying with 
the WinUAE Amiga emulator on my laptop.  I've had WinUAE installed for a 
month or so, but only used it to play the odd game of Outliners on an 
emulated Amiga 1200.

	I got it in my head that I was going to build a virtual Amiga 500 
that would mirror the real A500 I'm slowly building, with expanded 
Chip and Fast RAM, hard drives, and enough utils that I could function in 
the modern world.

It was easier that I thought.

	The emulated A500 had 8Mb FASTRAM, 2Mb Chip RAM, and Kickstart 1.3 
ROM, mirroring my real life A500 (aka "Michiru").  The only difference 
between the two is that the emulated A500 has two 4Gb hard drives, whereas 
Michiru has none (yet).  That'll change in time, though.

	The emulated A500 is light on software at the moment.  Apart from 
AmigaDOS 1.3, I've installed DirectoryOpus 4.x (my favourite file 
manager), and a few archivers.  I also loaded FastGIF2, a superfast GIF 
viewer, mostly for the Hell of it.  I'm limited to 16-colour GIFs, so I 
won't be doing much image viewing unless I'm bored.  If I'm REALLY bored, 
I could install an app like Art Department Pro and convert 256+ colour 
GIFs and/or JPEGS to Amiga-native IFF/ILBM or HAM pictures like I did back 
in the early 90s...

	I have a few more things (console handlers, shell utils, comms 
stuff) on the emulated hard drives, but I have to install it all when I 
have time.  It won't be long until I have the thing tweaked and ready for 
prime time.  Once that's done, I'll know what to do when I finally buy a 
hard drive solution for my real A500!