Code Like It's 198x

Cloanto

From Amiga software house to keeper of the Amiga's code

Companies & StudiosSource-checked

Cloanto began in Udine, Italy, in 1987 to publish Michele Battilana's word processor C1-Text, and made Amiga programs such as Personal Paint and Personal Fonts Maker. In 1997 it licensed the Amiga operating system to create Amiga Forever, an emulator package with legal Kickstart ROMs. It later acquired copyrights in the classic Amiga software and spent years in court with Hyperion over AmigaOS, settled in August 2026.

Cloanto’s name came out of a computer. According to the company, “CLOANTO” was the top entry in a list of several thousand names generated by an 8-bit machine programmed to favour words that were original and easy to say in many languages. The company it named started in Udine, in north-east Italy, as a one-product publisher of Amiga software. It became the business that legally puts the Amiga’s operating system on other computers, and later the owner of copyrights in the classic Amiga software itself.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1987, Udine, Italy, as Cloanto Italia srl
  • Run by: Michele (Michael) Console Battilana
  • Amiga programs: C1-Text, Personal Write, Personal Paint, Personal Fonts Maker
  • Emulation packages: Amiga Forever (first shown November 1997), C64 Forever
  • Rights: copyrights in Commodore and Amiga works up to 1993, confirmed by the company in 2015

A word processor and software for disabled users

Battilana told the Italian magazine Bitplane in 2002 that Cloanto Italia was born in 1987, when he was looking for the best way to publish and distribute the word processor he was finishing, C1-Text. A report in Commodore Computer Club in September 1988 shows a different side of the firm. Commodore had given an Amiga system to a disabled boy whose ability to communicate had been helped by a programmed C64, and had asked “Cloanto Italia” of Udine to write software for it. The magazine said Cloanto had worked “for years” solely on software for people with disabilities, and that the Amiga suited the job because of its mouse and its speech synthesis.

Italy’s Amiga market was small, and Cloanto looked abroad early. In April 1989 AmigaWorld‘s “Zeitgeist” column, reporting from a developers’ conference in Frankfurt, described “a small company in Udine, Italy called Cloanto, which has a very nice, fast word processor and an Amiga software and hardware system for the handicapped”. Its word processor had “a requester that lets you choose between five languages. How many American-made word processors do that?” Battilana later said that the Italian Amiga market was among the first to collapse, after Commodore’s Italian company failed, and that this had taken Cloanto abroad.

The Personal range

In the 1990s Cloanto’s Amiga programs carried the “Personal” name. Amazing Computing reviewed Personal Write in February 1992, “produced by Cloanto Italia and distributed by Centaur Software”, at a list price “below $50”. Personal Fonts Maker, a bitmap font editor, followed. Amiga Shopper gave away the full program on its cover disks in March 1996.

The best known was Personal Paint, a paint program written by Battilana himself; Amiga Shopper called him the “author of Personal Paint and head honcho at Cloanto”. Version 6.4 was bundled with some Amigas, and in 1997 Personal Paint 7 gained a module that did the blitter’s work on the main processor, 32 bits at a time instead of the blitter’s 16. Battilana explained that the Amiga normally needed bitmaps in scarce Chip RAM because “the original (Agnes) blitter chip and the Graphics library” both required it. With the new module and a rewritten graphics library from the CyberGraphX developers, he said, “a dream come true for many Amiga users who had plenty of Fast RAM but never enough Chip RAM”. In 1998 Cloanto released Personal Paint 6.4 as a free download which, Amazing Computing reported, “is not a demonstration version, but is fully functional”.

Amiga Forever

By 1997 PCs were fast enough to emulate an Amiga, but the emulators needed the Amiga’s Kickstart ROM and Workbench, which were copyrighted. Battilana told Bitplane that emulator authors at the time risked ending up in court, that Amiga engineers such as Dave Haynie had raised doubts about Amiga patents used in emulators without a licence, and that representatives of Gateway, the owner of the technology, had said “something had to be done”. Cloanto moved first. It reached agreements with the programmers of the UAE and Fellow emulators, which were not yet under the GPL, and negotiated with the Amiga companies. Brian King, one of WinUAE’s main authors, was working with Cloanto in Udine at the time.

Amazing Computing reported the result in December 1997. Cloanto had acquired from “the group of owners of Amiga technology (Gateway 2000, Inc., Amiga International, Inc. and Amiga, Inc.)” a licence covering all Amiga operating systems from 1.0 to 3.0, exclusive until some time in 1998. The package, code-named Amiga Forever, was to be presented on 14 November 1997 at the Computer ’97 show in Cologne. Amiga International’s Petro Tyschtschenko said in 1998, as Bitplane later quoted him, that licensing Cloanto to run the Amiga OS on a PC “was not an easy decision”.

Amiga Format reviewed the result in March 1998. It described Amiga Forever as UAE for Windows with “Workbenches and Kickstarts from 1.0 to 3.0, licensed to Cloanto by Gateway 2000”, Personal Paint and Amiga Explorer, Cloanto’s program for browsing a real Amiga’s files from a PC over a cable. It called the package “a commercial product for Amiga nostalgics loath to copy or steal Kickstart and Workbench” and the first CD “stylish but flawed”: installers failed “with cryptic messages” and most Windows machines it tried rejected the disc’s long file names. Battilana answered critics in CU Amiga: “the only negative things I ever heard about Amiga Forever are about people who never saw it.”

Later editions added history as well as software. Amiga Forever carried an interview with Jay Miner, the Amiga chipset’s designer, recorded by Cloanto’s own developers in 1990, and by 2002 a video of Dave Haynie’s Deathbed Vigil from the last days of Commodore. From 1999 it shipped “the latest version of WinUAE tested by Cloanto”. Amiga Forever is still sold, now in version 11, alongside C64 Forever, which does the same for Commodore’s 8-bit machines.

Owning the copyrights

Commodore’s bankruptcy in 1994 scattered its intellectual property. In 2015 Cloanto confirmed to the news site amiga-news.de that it owned the copyrights in Commodore and Amiga works created up to 1993, acquired around 2012 through a chain that ran from ESCOM to Gateway in 1997 and on through later holders. On 1 February 2019 Amiga, Inc. transferred its Amiga trademarks and its remaining intellectual property to C-A Acquisition Corporation, a company owned by Battilana. It was renamed Amiga Corporation in July 2020.

That put Cloanto on the opposite side from Hyperion Entertainment, the Belgian company that had developed AmigaOS 4 under a licence it won in a 2009 settlement with Amiga, Inc. Cloanto sued Hyperion in December 2017 in New York; the case moved to the federal court in Seattle in 2018 and was joined with a suit Hyperion had brought against the Amiga companies. Cloanto’s claims covered breach of the 2009 settlement, copyright infringement and trademarks. In 2023 the district court held that none of the plaintiffs had standing to sue Hyperion over those claims, a ruling Hyperion called a “sweeping victory”. On 12 June 2025 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in an unpublished memorandum, partly reversed that ruling. Cloanto could not sue for breach of an agreement it had not signed. But because “it is undisputed that Cloanto is the legal owner of the copyrights that Hyperion allegedly infringed”, it could bring its copyright claims, which went back to the lower court. The appeal court did not decide whether Hyperion had infringed anything.

The dispute ended out of court. On 4 August 2026 Hyperion and Amiga Corporation announced a settlement under the heading “all ongoing legal disputes ended”. Hyperion may distribute AmigaOS 3.2 and 3.3 until the end of 2027 and then hand over the source code of AmigaOS 3.1.4, after which Amiga Corporation takes over development of the 68000-family AmigaOS; Hyperion continues AmigaOS 4 under licence. Hyperion’s director Timothy De Groote said the company looked forward to finishing AmigaOS 3.3 and 4.2 “so that the focus can return to the users and the operating system we all love”.

The ROMs today

The Kickstart ROMs and Workbench are still copyrighted, which is why emulators do not include them. Amiga Forever and C64 Forever are the licensed way to get them; the alternatives are copying the ROM from a machine you own, where the law allows it, or using a free replacement such as the AROS Kickstart, which runs some Amiga software but not all (see WinUAE).

Sources

  • Cloanto, “Corporate Profile” (web, secondary): the origin of the name. https://cloanto.com/profile/
  • Bitplane (Italy), February 2002, interview with Michele Console Battilana by Claudio Marro Filosa: the founding in 1987 and C1-Text; the Italian market after Commodore Italiana’s failure; the origins of Amiga Forever in 1997, the licensing problem, agreements with the UAE and Fellow authors, Brian King in Udine; Petro Tyschtschenko’s 1998 remark. The same issue’s review of Amiga Forever 5: the 1990 Jay Miner interview and the Deathbed Vigil video.
  • Commodore Computer Club (Italy) no. 56, September 1988, news: Cloanto Italia’s software for disabled users.
  • AmigaWorld vol. 5 no. 4, April 1989, p. 6, “Zeitgeist”: Cloanto of Udine and its five-language word processor.
  • Commodore Computer Club no. 70, December 1989: review of C1-Text.
  • Amazing Computing vol. 7 no. 2, February 1992: review of Personal Write; vol. 7 no. 8, August 1992: review of Personal Fonts Maker.
  • Amiga Shopper issue 60, March 1996: Personal Fonts Maker 2 on the cover disks; issue 70, Christmas 1996: Battilana as “author of Personal Paint and head honcho at Cloanto”.
  • Amiga Computing issue 111, April 1997, news: Personal Paint 7’s CPU blitting module and Battilana’s comments.
  • Amazing Computing vol. 12 no. 12, December 1997, New Products: the Amiga Forever licence and its presentation at Computer ’97 in Cologne.
  • Amiga Format issue 108, March 1998, pp. 21–23, Simon Goodwin, UAE feature: the Amiga Forever review.
  • CU Amiga, February 1998, Amiga Forever feature: Battilana’s comment.
  • Amazing Computing vol. 13 no. 8, August 1998: Personal Paint 6.4 released free, the first 6.4 “also bundled with some Amiga computers”; vol. 14 no. 9, September 1999: Amiga Forever 3.0 with WinUAE.
  • Amiga Forever and C64 Forever home pages (web, secondary): current versions. https://www.amigaforever.com/ and https://www.c64forever.com/
  • amiga-news.de, “Cloanto confirms transfers of Commodore/Amiga copyrights”, 19 February 2015 (web, secondary). http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-02-00027-EN.html
  • amiga-news.de, “Legal dispute: Amiga Inc. transferred rights to Mike Battilana’s company”, 5 February 2019 (web, secondary). https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2019-02-00009-EN.html
  • amiga-news.de, “C-A Acquisition Corp. renamed to Amiga Corporation”, 15 July 2020 (web, secondary). https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2020-07-00032-EN.html
  • Cloanto Corporation v. Hyperion Entertainment C.V.B.A., N.D.N.Y. no. 5:17-cv-01353 (filed 14 December 2017) and W.D. Wash. no. 2:18-cv-00535, consolidated with Hyperion Entertainment C.V.B.A. v. Itec, LLC, W.D. Wash. no. 2:18-cv-00381 (public record; docket summaries on CourtListener). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70497006/cloanto-corporation-v-hyperion-entertainment-cvba/
  • amiga-news.de, “Hyperion/Cloanto litigation: judgment in the main lawsuit issued”, 2 April 2023 (web, secondary): the district court’s ruling and Hyperion’s “sweeping victory”. https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2023-04-00011-EN.html
  • Cloanto Corporation v. Hyperion Entertainment C.V.B.A., no. 23-35315, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, memorandum, filed 12 June 2025, not for publication (public record). https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memoranda/2025/06/12/23-35315.pdf
  • Hyperion Entertainment, “Hyperion Entertainment BV and Amiga Corporation reach settlement – all ongoing legal disputes ended”, 4 August 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
  • amiga-news.de, “Amiga and Hyperion announce out-of-court settlement”, 4 August 2026 (web, secondary): the terms. https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2026-08-00022-EN.html
  • Wikipedia, “Hyperion Entertainment” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the 2009 settlement with Amiga, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Entertainment

See also

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