First Installation

Requirements

• Any recent Linux OS (Debian Bullseye or newer, Ubuntu 20.04 or newer), or macOS for Apple hardware (intel/Apple Silicon).
• Your own Amiga Kickstart ROMs. You can use the encrypted Amiga Forever ones as well, if you include the "key.rom" file with them in the same directory. Newer versions of Amiga Forever don't include a key, but they require you to run Amiga Forever once, to decrypt them. Copy them over after that step.

Which version should I pick?

Amiberry nowadays has two versions available:

Amiberry-Lite

• Based on WinUAE 4.4.0.

• Good balance of compatibility and performance (but not perfect).

• Includes "Fast Copper" hack, to speed up certain games that might benefit from it. Might cause glitches elsewhere!

• Cycle accurate for 68000 mode only, stripped down CPU emulation for other models. Models higher than 020 (030-040) don't use proper CPU cycles, they are just faked using 020 (they still show up as the selected model under emulation, of course). No 68060 support.

• Includes JIT for ARM (not on MacOS).

• Recommended for slower hardware (up to RPI4), or if you want JIT for ARM.

• This version lives in a separate repository: https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amiberry-lite

Amiberry

• Based on the latest WinUAE available.

• Most accurate version, but heavier on CPU requirements than v5.x.

• Includes full CPU (68000-68060) cycle-accurate emulation, latest chipset emulation updates.

• JIT for x86_64 (not on MacOS).

• MMU support.

• Debugger (console-based).

• Recommended for all platforms faster than the RPI4, including all macOS and x86_64 platforms

• This version can be found on the main repository: https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amiberry

Installation

For most cases, the easiest/recommended way of installing Amiberry/Amiberry-Lite, is to use the provided installer package:

• For Debian-based and Ubuntu systems, there is a DEB package available.

• For Fedora and similar systems, there is an RPM package.

• For macOS, there are DMG images, which when mounted, allow you to drag and drop the application in your Applications folder.

The installer packages will take care of any requirements for you, place things in their default locations for your system, and (for Linux cases) add Amiberry in the path automatically. You can then run it from the console (e.g. amiberry or amiberry-lite) or from your desktop menu.

First run and default paths

When Amiberry first starts up, it will automatically look for, and generate if necessary, some default files and directories it requires. These are documented in a dedicated page of the wiki: https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amiberry/wiki/Amiberry-directories

In case you have special needs, and require control over where Amiberry will look for and create those directories, there are a few ways to customize things using a few special ENV variables. Check the wiki article above for more details on how to do that.