http://www.amigaforever.com
https://twitter.com/amigaforever
https://www.facebook.com/AmigaForever

I posted the following on Amiga Forever's Facebook page on April 28th:

GOG.com (btw, not affiliated, just a fan) sells DRM-free digital versions of classic games and they have expressed interest in bringing Amiga games to their site. The trouble is, they can't just sell the bare-bones .adf files because they are committed to only releasing versions of games that contain everything needed to run on modern operating systems in a single executable. For example, their DOS releases come with preconfigured versions of the emulator DOSbox to run them, no tinkering required.

People are clamoring to get a hold of classics like Dungeon Master, Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun, Flashback and Lemmings without spending obscene amounts of money on eBay or resorting to piracy. This is where you come in. If you could partner with GOG to find some way to make this legally, technically and financially feasible, Amiga fans worldwide would be forever grateful.

Think about it.

I got this response from Mike Labatt in a PM on May 5th that I apparently missed until today:

Hi, Mike here from Amiga Forever. Thanks for your message about GOG. We had contacts with them, but it was years ago. Did you see recent signs of renewed interest?

The ball is in your court GOG.

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/port_amiga_games

So, how did people from Amiga Forever obtain publisher rights to Amiga titles?

edit: oh, it's the emulator. So yeah, that would be nice. But it's just one step on a long way to trying to find who on earth has rights to these super old games and sell them. Effort might not be worth of possible sales.

I can't really see it happen. They asked them :D. Places like Back to the Roots has a huge library of games that you could download legally for free, since they got a "license" to distribute the Amiga games. Also some of the Amiga game publishers allow you to download their games of their website legally.

Oh, that sounds cool. But if they are free and the emulator is free... there are no many reasons for having it on GOG.com
Why would they use their precious time on something that is legally avaible elsewhere for free?

AFAIK not all games included with Amiga Forever are freeware, I'm quite sure it's a more complicated deal and that the publishers get their share.

Anyway, I fully support the idea of GOG providing Amiga games. Amiga games would fit in perfectly, much more than any console games.

AFAIK the Amiga's operating system is _not_ free, which is one of the biggest hurdles in reviving those classics. The emulator is free, several games _might_ be free (there's still the question how well that would hold up if an affected party contested it), but without the Kickstarter ROM it's all moot.

But isn't it the same deal as with DosBox? Emulating the system without using any of the original assets?

no. it needs the kickstarter roms

http://www.amigaforever.com/

It's a bit more complicated than that, but my point may be moot. I just checked the site of Amiga Forever, and they _are_ distributing the Kickstarter ROMs and the Workbench software already, so perhaps they did obtain the respective license and my info is outdated.

I don't know what Kickstarter ROM is :-(

Most emulators require original system roms (essentially their operating systems/BIOS) to operate (think virtual machines that allow you to run WinXP on Win7/8). Dosbox does not AFAIK. It's been build from ground up to emulate the functionality of DOS.

It is the bootstrap firmware for amigas. different amigas had different versions:

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstart_(Amiga)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstart_(Amiga)[/url]

"The Kickstart contains many of the core components of the Amiga's operating system, such as:
-Exec - the Amiga's multi-tasking kernel
-Intuition - functionality for GUI, screens, windowing and handling of input/output devices
-Autoconfig - functionality to automatically initialize or boot from compliant expansion hardware
-Floppy disk device driver and file system to read and boot from floppy disk
-DOS library for file access and handling
-AmigaDOS - Command Line Interface (CLI) functionality and a number of core CLI commands
-Graphics library for basic drawing and raster graphics functions using the native Amiga chipset
-Audio device driver for the native Amiga sound hardware
-Device drivers for the Amiga keyboard and mouse/gameports"

See here.

Thank you guys for replying :-)

Kickstart is the underlying OS of the Amiga. Workbench is basically the GUI that uses Kickstart to provide a desktop.

The DOS used in DOSBox is a clean-room reverse engineered version of MS-DOS, which makes it safe to distribute freely. Microsoft have no claims to it. There has been no such reverse-engineered version of Kickstart though.

Edit: Dem ninjas.