Launching Windows Apps from AmigaOS in WinUAE
A feature that I’ve found particularly useful in AmiKit XE is the Rabbit Hole.
In a nutshell, the Rabbit Hole allows you to launch apps on your Windows system while you are still in your Amiga environment.
Since everything in AmiKit is available for free (you’re paying for the configuration - and I think that’s a fir price for the work that’s gone into it), I wanted to look to see if I could get this to work on my 3.1.4 setup, also in WinUAE.
I started off by downloading and unpacking winlaunch.lha from AmiNet.
Following the instructions in the README, I copied the winlaunch file to SYS:C on the Amiga and winlaunch.alib to the winuae_dll folder in my WinUAE folder in Windows (this was in C:\Program Files (x86)\WinUAE).
I opened a command shell and typed winlaunch notepad but all I got back was an error telling me that the DLL couldn’t be loaded.
Hmmmmm......
A little bit of sniffing around the interwebs led me to this page which suggested that to get Winlaunch to work, you need to Allow native code in WinUAE.
This is in the Miscellaneous section of the WinUAE configuration so I went ahead and enabled it. Upon rebooting the Amiga, I tried the command again and it worked!
All I need now is to find out where I can get some nice icons and I’ll be able to use my Amiga system as a pretty little launcher for all my stuff, even when I have to use Windows (like, for things like writing this blog post), just like is possible in AmiKit;
