Amiga Classics

The Good
What did I like about this compilation, to be honest very, very little. There is game content here but it's not what was expected and the tools provided are inadequate

The Bad
My first problem is with the documentation, or rather the lack of it. For example I find really hard to understand why the publishers only supplied details of the games in the first twenty-five game files. I mean, come on guys you must have had this information when you threw this thing together, the only way I can see what games are present on this disc is to open every one and then make notes.

Secondly there's so very little in the way of guidance on installing and running the emulators. One version of the Fellow emulator I did manage to get running under Windows proved to be a DOS program. When it ran it helpfully shut down Windows completely, no DOS window for this baby, and lost part of my work for me.
All the emulators I looked at had little in the way of documentation explaining how to configure them and link in the game files, Kickstarter Rom etc. I use emulators a lot but this was my first time trying to get an Amiga emulator to work. I spent all day trying to get some joy out of the stuff on this CD with limited success.
The emulators and software provided does seem very fussy about the machine it runs on. I tried the Windows emulators under WIN 98, WIN XP, Win XP Pro, Win XP with Win 95/WIN 98 compatibility mode and I even tried Win 3.11. Most of the software failed with a message that it was incompatible with the version of Windows being run. I've had this before and have usually been able to work around it, that wasn't possible here - wish I still had a WIN 95 environment because that seems to be what is needed. In the end I had to abandon all hope of using the supplied software on any of my machines and install the latest version of a freeware emulator just to see if any of the game files would run. The latest versions of FSUAE and WINUAE, together with help from other contributors to this site, had me up and running.

Now to discuss the games. The front of the package states that there are 'more three hundred games' in the package, this is not entirely accurate, here's the maths:
- There are 250 files in the ASI series each containing between two and six games, that's a minimum of five hundred games and a conservative estimate would be closer to seven hundred
- There are eighteen files in the GG series, I can't run these - more on that later - but looking inside the files with a hex editor shows that they are a 'Games Galore' series and that the series contains 175 games.
Even allowing for games in one series being duplicated in another the claimed number of games is, by my guesstimate, around half of what's actually here.

On the back of the packaging the more detailed description says that there are some games and some game demos. Having examined the game files for days now everything I've come across so far has been a freeware game and/or a covermount game. The ASI series of files were created by a couple of guys calling themselves 'the Assassins' and has been seen in old Amiga magazines being sold as compilations of public domain software as far back as 1993. They are all available on-line, I found them on the charityware site AmigaPD but they are available in other places too.
Now freeware and shareware isn't a problem for me, it's actually something I look for, I would prefer this CD to be clearly labelled about what it contains. To suggest that these are games and game demos implies that the content is largely commercial software and, while I have not been through every file, this does not seem to be the case.

Finally, and quite annoyingly, all the game files were intended for the A1200 machine. To run them you will need an appropriate Kickstart ROM but on the CD the only Kickstart ROM is for the A500. This means that all the Games Galore files are unusable, guess which kind of file I spent the first few hours trying to run :-(, and within the ASI series the odd game will fail to run, so far I've tried forty or so games and have had no more than half a dozen failures. I've also had problems with some of the files containing utilities and tools.

The Bottom Line
If you know what you're doing you don't need this because you can get all the games for free from the internet together with emulators and on-line documentation

If you don't know what you're doing you don't need this product either and for exactly the same reasons, this is definitely not for you. This compilation will not hold your hand and guide you gently through the process of installing and configuring any of the emulators on any of the platforms. In addition some of the games and game files are incompatible with the supplied Kickstart ROM.