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Comment by chris_j | Hacker News Reader

I bought Amiga Forever a few years ago in order to get the Kickstart ROMs that I needed to play some games in FS-UAE on my Mac. Trying to actually get the content onto my Mac was more painful than I'd anticipated. "To install the stuff you've just bought, just double click this .msi installer". Heh, thanks.

(I can't remember what I did in the end but I did manage to get the Kickstart ROMs into my Mac.)

EDIT: typo.

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It seems they offer an .iso download link now alongside the one for the .msi

The kickstart ROMs are still encrypted on the ISO and AF stores unencrypted versions on disk after you run it but if you're on a Mac/Linux you can use romtool to decrypt them

https://amitools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/romtool.html

AFAIR the "encryption" is just an XOR with their license text file (LICENSE.txt?) as a large key

That was some time ago when I got it, so maybe it's different now

>Encrypted ROMs

Which of course protects nothing, and is easily worked around. But it is still evil.

People will go on to claim that Cloanto isn't evil, and that the only reason they haven't open sourced AmigaOS is Hyperion.

Yet Cloanto does shit like this. I wonder if these same people can explain how this helps.

Where did Cloanto ever refer to this as "encryption"? It is a simple XOR, and it is open source. They always said they were "encoded" because Amiga International or Gateway asked them to. ROM encoding has been supported by UAE since 1997.

(Interesting takeover attempt by the usual "anti Cloanto" trolls.)

Post Scriptum - Found some info here:

https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/16-128

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