Somewhere in the forums I have seen someone mentionin AmigaForever and visited their website. As far as I understand, they have acquired the rights of amiga kickstart roms and the product they are selling (Amiga Forever Premium Edition) makes it possible to play the entire Amiga library very easily. Without further research, I have immediately ordered a copy... I was wondering if anyone has already bought/tested this?

I bought it and the Commodore 64 during the summer holidays and let me tell, it has been a fantastic experience. It's easy to use (although when emulating Amiga systems you have to get used to the Workbench and the way the drives are labelled) and there are some great games and fun to be had. Furthermore, there's an abundance of ROMs that are already included and probably more to be found (Dream17 has all of Team17s Amiga ROMs). Just make sure to use the RP9 Manager to convert diskette images into a single file that makes using programmes that much easier. Plus their customer support is excellent. They released the 2012 version soon after I bought the 2011 one and I got a free upgrade.

IS Amiga Forever the reason why we won't be having any Amiga-emulated games on GOG in foreseeable feature?

I would think it would be to the contrary - if it was as reliable and as easy-to-use as DOSBox, and if there's actual demand for Amiga games, I'm sure they would already be at work on acquiring the rights to preparing some Amiga games for sale.

I keep meaning to buy a copy, but never get around to it. Perhaps later this year...

I bought the very first version that came out. It was really a pain using it :)
The Tool improved a lot. Adding new games/programs is really easy and everything works just nice.

A good to know for everyone considering buying Amiga Forever.
The cheap version only comes with the 1.3 kickstartet rom (this is sufficient for most games).
If you like to use more complex games/ programs, the more expensive versions does come with newer kickstarter roms.

Trial and error? Mostly error. Really, once you get one game running yourself (by looking at the way AF does it), you'll know 90% of what you need to know to do it again. Only 2-3 Kickstart ROMs are in frequent use.

Well, that's what the RP9 manager is for. It turns .adf files into .rp9 files, while also assigning them the required hardware that is necessary to run. Most games have to be run, by the machine (Amiga hardware) not Workbench. If you don't know what to do, open the Workbench 3.X, tell it to mount the diskette image (.adf), then rests the emulated machine. But as I've said, once you add a game/application into the manager, you should have no problems running it. Just select and click play. In the worst case scenario, you can always check the LemonAmiga site for when the game was released, so that you know which hardware to use.

That's all. Easy as pie. Christ, it's more difficult to get some modern games to run. DOSBox is far more complicated (in comparison of course. DOSBox for most of the DOS era games is easy to configure).

There is a lot of Amiga models, but just a few configs is really needed to play.
For a start:

- oldest games needs just 0.5 chip RAM, MC68000 OCS chipset, Kickstart 1.2 (Amiga 1000, old 2000s and 500s);

- most games works well with an extended late Amiga 500 config: 0.5 Mb chip RAM, 0.5 Mb 'slow' RAM, MC68000, ECS chipset, Kickstart 1.3 (Amiga 500 + A501 trapdoor RAM extension);

- newest games needs 2 Mb chip RAM, 2+ Mb Fast RAM, MC680EC20, AGA chipset, Kickstart 3+ (more Fast RAM the better, you can try MC68040 too) (Amiga 1200 ->
Amiga 4000).

A CD32 is a Amiga 1200 + CD-ROM,
and a CDTV is Amiga 500 + CD-ROM + updated Kickstart 1.x

There isn't a lot of games who only works with A600/A3000 Kickstart 2.X
(none I'm aware of)

I think it is more to do with the rom's which it needs. AmigaForever in itself is just another emulator, just as DOSBox. If you wanted to ship each Amiga game with the emulator (as GoG now does with DOSBox games) the cost would rise since you would need to ship the rom with them also.

thank you monteynard and scureuil for all the useful info

It's not as much an emulator as a complicated frontend for WinUAE with legit roms thrown in.

Granted, but it do not change the fact that for each copy of the emulator you need a rom-file to make it work.

You could argue that GoG could sell version of AmifaForever and the games separately, just making sure that this is clearly stated. The question is then, what would GoG be doing which Cloanto is not already doing themselves?

And that's why I refuse to pay for this.