I will need to play with the screenmode settings to fill the Surface Go screen, which uses a larger than normal screen resolution, which results in black bars above and below the AmiKit Xe full screen display. I suspect changing it will make the icons look out of proportion. For now I'll leave it but I'm sure I will play with it soon enough!

I loaded up Eagleplayer to enjoy my extensive MOD collection, which I transferred to the SD card on the Surface Go. 

AmiKit XE WinUAE configuration automatically mounts all Windows drives into the emulation, so it is easy to access all my emulation files without moving them into the pre-configured AmiKit XE environment.

As mentioned, the AGA demos worked perfectly on the Surface Go once I switch the CPU to 68060 in the WinUAE emulation:

Games worked a treat too:

Now, I turned my attention to loading AmiKit XE onto my late 2013 Mac Pro system. Since I bought the license for Mac, Windows and Linux, it makes sense to get it running on those systems to get my money's worth! I also wanted to share the installation experience so you know what to expect..

I am running MacOS Mojave on my Mac Pro.

First I open up the DMG file I downloaded, which prompts the system requirements and click Okay to proceed to mount the DMG on your Mac:

Here is the mounted DMG. Gotta love Macs sometimes - to install on your Mac drag the AmiKit XE icon over the Application shortcut icon. That's it:

It is VERY important to read the Quick guide included in the DMG. It contains a lot of information on how to setup AmiKit XE to work on Windows, Mac and linux. Right now I care about the Mac so I turn to that section and download the required Quartz software, install and restart when prompted.

 Continuing to follow the guide, I open the package contents of the installed AmiKit XE so I can copy the kickstart rom from my Amiga forever CD to the required rom folder location.

Buy the way I am using Pathfinder as my Finder replacement in case you are interested in such things. I wanted an Amiga DOpus style file manager on MacOS and it fitted the bill nicely!

As per the instructions I copied the kickstart rom files from my whdload installation on my Amiga 4000 to the Rabbithole/T folder so they can be used in WHDLoad under AmiKitXE.

 The rom folder contains a nice text file to help with all this too if you need it - ROMfind is only on the Windows version, but the other info is useful as it tells you where you can get the rom files from and where to put them (this information is in the Quick Guide I mentioned earlier too):

 With that done I launched AmiKitXE from it's icon in Applications folder, and it warned me it is a 32 bit application. I am concerned if this means it will stop working when the new MacOS is released later this year? Hopefully the AmiKit XE team are on top of this and will update it before that happens...

AmiKit XE on MacOS is basically using WinUAE running under Wine to execute, rather than as a native emulation like FS-UAE, etc..

When running it next prompts to download a require wine package to continue - I get it to download and install it:

 With that done, AmiKit launcher now appears, and looks identical to the Windows version. It should really, after all it IS the Windows version, running on MacOS using Wine!

Just wanted to show it is actually running on MacOS!

I copied the AmigaOS 3.9 CD iso file to my desktop for the next step, as AmiKit XE needs the AmigaOS files (same as Windows version too of course) but unlike Windows I don't have Amiga Forever installed on MacOS, hence the iso for AmigaOS 3.9.

I clicked on the Configure option in the launcher to get the WinUAE preferences. I then go to the CD section and mounted the CD iso file from the desktop.

Because AmiKitXE is running in a Wine container, the view of the drives is a bit strange, but they are there, with the exception of my thunderbolt external drive (for some reason - because it is HFS formatted perhaps?).

With that done I launch the emulation using the launch button. I am immediately prompted to allow AmiKitXE access to the accessibility features of my Mac, so I need to go to the Security & Privacy preferences to allow this, as below:

With that done I get AmigaOS booting up and prompting for the initial download and install of Picasso96.lha for the RTG screen mode support:

 That worked well, so next up I had to point the installer to my AmigaOS 3.9 system files:

 I mounted the CD in WinUAE prefs before booting the emulation (as shown), but you can do it at this point too by pressing F12 and mounting it too.

 The install runs through:

 Install is almost done, need to set the screen mode as we did on the Windows version before - a reboot of the emulation is needed first:

 Note that in the MacOS installation it doesn't default to the 720p resolution and you need to select it yourself and click Test to make sure it works before saving:

 With that done, the installation is completed, ready for final reboot of the emulation:

 AmiKit Xe now launches on my Mac Pro and looks great!
 
 Here it is running on my 4K Mac Pro desktop - you can run it full screen too but for now I am happy to run it in a window:

On the MacOS version, the drives are mounted as Windows style drives in the emulation (makes sense since it is the Windows version), but you may have to hunt around to find which drive is the MacOS one if you have multiple drives connected (as I do) - in my case WinDH_Z:

 TBL's sublime Silkcut demo - yes I think so:

 The demo runs nice and smooth:

 
 I also run Banshee AGA - a nice Core Design shoot em up:

 Again, it works well!

Last, but not least, I wanted to try out the Linux version of AmiKit XE. To be honest I expected issues because Linux ALWAYS causes issues in my experiences with it over 20 years. But I decided to give it a go because I wanted to try it out on Linux too!

My Linux install is Linux Mint 18.2 on a Core i7 desktop PC. It sits right next to my AmigaOne X5000 at the moment.

I inserted the AmiKitXE usb stick into it (which glowed beautifully) and viewed the intro movie included on it "just because":

After so much installation work I settled down to the installation on Linux. I read through the setup guide and specifically the Linux section of it.

A prerequisite for the installed is PlayOnLinux, since this linux version (like the Mac Version) uses the Windows WinUAE under Wine to run.

I previously installed AmiKit X on this computer so I already had PlayOnLinux installed, and the version I had installed was the minimum version needed according to the instructions. So all good?

I then extracted the linux archive of AmiKit XE from the usb stick to my downloads folder on my linux box.

With that done I launched PlayOnLinux and followed the instructions to execute a local script:

I stepped through the wizard:

The script to run is located in the extracted archive from the USB stick that I put in the downloads folder called POL_install_AmiKitXE:

 As the instructions say, you get warnings that the script signature is not valid. You can click Next, tick "I agree" and Next again to continue:

With that we get the AmiKit XE setup welcome screen:

Next we need to select the setup MSI which is included in the extracted AmiKitXE archive we extracted to the downloads folder:

The file is AmiKitXE-linux.msi:

This is where it all went pear shaped, with a nasty error that the script couldn't find Wine 3.21-staging version and the scripts stopped here! Disaster!

I had to cancel the script.

Back in the PlayOnLinux window, there is an option under Tools to manage the Wine versions. I thought it would be as simple as adding the 3.21-staging version and off we go. However, it was not listed as available - version 3.20 was the latest:

So this is where I realised that the instructions about the minimum version of PlayOnLinux 4.2.10 were not really correct. I needed to update my version of PlayOnLinux to a newer version first.

However, according to Linux Mint the version of PlayOnLinux I had (4.2.10) was the latest version available!

Hmmm...so I checked the PlayOnLinux website and sure enough, there is a newer version. But to get it I have to add their respositories into my Linux installation so I can get it. I had to hand edit the supplied lines to reflect the version of linux I had. Seriously, nothing is easy on linux. Really.

I followed the instructions above to add the repository for PlayOnLinux and then get the latest version which is 4.3.4.

Note that I also had to install xterm separately before it would work, which I did with: sudo apt-get install xterm

Here is PlayOnLinux after the upgraded installation:

Now when I check the Wine version manager under the Tools menu, I can now finally see all the latest builds, and the specific one the AmiKit XE script needs to work: 3.21-staging as below:

I then right on the right arrow button to initialise the installation of that Wine Version into PlayOnLinux:

With that done, I then can see the version is available to PlayOnLinux.

I then ran the local script option again from the Tools menu in PlayOnLinux, and this time I selected the option to erase the previously created AmiKitXE virtual drive (since it failed):

Now the script worked as expected, and stepped through downloading Microsoft fonts and other items it needed from the internet as part of the setup:

Now the installation kicks off the Windows portion of it's installation:

I got this error but I clicked Yes and everything still worked so...

The installation completed:

With that done, we now have the AmiKit XE launcher in the PlayOnLinux program window, and we can start to copy across the kickstart rom files (as we did for MacOS version) into the correct folders in the new installation. Within PlayOnLinux we can click on the AmiKitXE icon to see the option to open the directory:

I then copy the other Amiga forever kickstart roms into the Rabbithole/T folder as per the instructions so that these will be imported into AmiKit XE on first boot up:

I also downloaded picasso96.lha from Aminet as the Linux version doesn't have an option to download it automatically from what I could see.

I then followed the instructions to put the picasso96.lha archive into the Rabbithole folder - it wasn't clear if it has to go into T like all the other files or the root of Rabbithole folder - I put it in both to be safe:

I then launched AmiKit XE from PlayOnLinux and it came up with the usual AmiKit launcher, now under Linux:

As before, I had to copy the AmigaOS 3.9 CD ISO into the Downloads folder on Linux, and mount it in WinUAE using the Configure option in AmiKit:

I then ran the emulation and stepped through the installation. It works identically to the MacOS version so I won't bore you with step by step screenshots of that!

The install completed fine:

On reboot of the emulation I got the full AmitKit XE environment running beautifully on my Linux Mint 18 PC:

Playing mod files using native Amiga emulation under Linux never gets old:

I had a quick go at the included demo version of the game called AmiJeweled:

The AmiKit XE start menu looks great:

I ran TBL's Starstruck on AmiKit XE on my linux box and it ran flawlessly, no slowdown:

I also ran some classic demos like State of the Art, which worked great as well (WHDLoad):

Whew. It took more time than I expected to prepare this blog post but I hope it helps you to see how flexible and powerful AmiKit XE is, how the installation works on each platform.

Regardless of whether you ran MacOS, Linux or Windows, you can enjoy your favourite Amiga demos, games and applications anytime on your daily main machine with AmiKit XE!

I didn't have time to look more at the bootable version of AmiKit XE (from the USB stick) or the updated Flowerpot version, but I might find some time down the track to do so. I suspect it would need another blog post anyway as this one is already quite long! Thanks for sticking with me this far!

I would love to see the bootable USB version expanded in the future to boot on PowerPC based AmigaOne systems like the X1000, X5000 and A1222 so we can boot Classic Amiga emulation directly on Next Gen Amiga systems as well. If we could install that to hard disk to dual boot that would be truly awesome. :-)