u/goqsane

I recently bought an Amiga 500 on eBay and have been having an unreasonable amount of fun cleaning it up, retrobrighting it, and generally behaving like I'm 12 again.

There is one particular part of the Amiga experience that I never really got to have as a kid, though.

I grew up with an A500 and Kickstart 1.3. A friend who lived nearby had an Amiga 600 with a hard drive, Kickstart 2.x, WHDLoad, and a properly organized Workbench. Games, demos, utilities, applications, everything neatly arranged on the hard drive.

To me, that machine might as well have been from the future.

I always imagined that one day I would have an A600 or A1200 of my own, with the "fancy" Workbench, a hard drive, lots of software installed, and the whole machine set up as a mature system rather than booting almost everything from floppy.

That never happened. I stayed with my A500 for years, which I absolutely loved. It was also the machine on which I made my first attempts at programming. I'm a Principal Software Architect today, so the little beige box certainly did its job.

Now I'm in my 40s, I have a young child of my own, and I have finally bought another A500. I also have a PiStorm on the way. I know PiStorm has its fans and detractors, but for me the exciting part is that it may finally let me build the Amiga I imagined having all those years ago.

So my question is: does the community know of a good pre-built hard drive image that I could start with?

Ideally, I am looking for something along these lines:

* Workbench 2.x, 3.x, or perhaps even 3.2

* WHDLoad already installed and configured

* A good collection of games and demos

* Useful utilities and productivity software

* Sensible directory organization

* Workbench configured nicely rather than being a completely stock installation

* Something intended to be explored and used, rather than just a giant dump of files

Basically, I would love to boot the machine and get that feeling of sitting down in front of my friend's well-organized Amiga that somebody has already taken the time to set up properly.

I realize that building the system yourself is part of the fun for many people. I also know myself well enough to admit that if I start from a completely blank disk, my ADHD will probably turn "set up Workbench" into a years-long project involving twenty unrelated side quests.

I have searched around Archive.org and elsewhere, but I have not yet found quite what I am describing.

Does something like this already exist? Perhaps a commonly used HDF image, a community build, an Archive.org collection, or some other starting point that people here would recommend?

I would be extremely grateful for any pointers.