Getting Started with AMOS
Set up AMOS Professional on an emulated Amiga, then type and run your first program.
What You Need
AMOS isn’t a toolchain you install — it’s a program that runs on the Amiga, with its own editor built in. So there’s no compiler to set up. You need three things: an emulator to be the Amiga, a Kickstart ROM for it to boot, and AMOS Professional itself.
🎨 AMOS Professional
AMOS Professional is free. Its author, François Lionet, released it to the public domain, so you can download and use the whole thing — editor, libraries and examples — at no cost.
Get it
- Aminet — AMOS Professional (the official release)
- AMOS Professional on GitHub
You’ll end up with a set of Amiga disk images (.adf). The one you boot from is the System disk; the others (Tutorial, Examples) are worth keeping for later.
🖥️ Emulator + Kickstart
Install an Amiga emulator natively for the best experience.
macOS / Linux
brew install --cask fs-uae # macOS
sudo apt install fs-uae # LinuxWindows — Download WinUAE
Kickstart ROM
The emulator needs a Kickstart ROM — and AMOS Professional wants Kickstart 2.0 or later, so set the machine to an A500 Plus or A1200. Get a ROM by dumping one from a real Amiga, or from Amiga Forever.
Run It
- Make an A500 Plus (or A1200) machine in your emulator, with a Kickstart 2.0+ ROM.
- Put the AMOS Professional System disk in drive
DF0:and start the machine. - After a moment, the AMOS editor appears — a green screen with a row of icons and an empty page.
- Type your program, and press F1 to run it.
- Press a key to come back to the editor when you’re done.
That’s the whole loop. There’s nothing to assemble and nothing to link — in AMOS, the editor is the thing that runs your program.