These games are great, but.....

[Brintinacx]

I am currently playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. A game I wanted when I had my Amiga, but never purchased. I wish I had, gives the King's Quest series a run for their money. I also am enjoying all my old favorites. I did, however, forget how long some of these games take to load. I know I'm on a machine that isn't quite my Quad-Core Proccessor, but the programmers could have helped out a bit. In Indiana Jones, just to see him get in a car and drive away, I have to go from disk 2, to 4, to 11, to 3. First of all, I am in no way a programmer, but man, do they think before they do something? Why wouldn't all that data have been put on one disk, so I don't have to swap, just to see him get in a car and drive off! LoL. For arguments sake, let's say there was too much data for one disk (rediculous I know, but let's play along), why in God's name wouldn't you put it on disks 2, 3, 4, 5, in that order. I mean, jump to disk 11? Did they forget the car door opening, and throw it on disk 11 at the last minute? Seems silly to me, but again I'm not a programmer. Despite silly stuff like that, that bugs me, I am still enjoying my trip down Memory Lane.

[AlexJ]

I think it was intended (or recommended at least) to be Hard Disk installed by the user rather than played off the floppies. You can emulate hard disks etc. in WinUAE which may make the experience more enjoyable.

Also note that by default WinUAE tries to emulate floppy read times of the Amiga exactly. You can crank it up to 8x read speed in the options, although this may cause problems (not in my experience).

[Graham Humphrey]

Yes, it's fair to say they weren't exactly designed with the floppy user in mind and given the size of most of these types of games it's a bit difficult to see how they could be.

[Buleste]

If i remember rightly Beneath A Steel Sky was even worse and you had 15 disks to contend with.

[J T]

Man, and I thought the original Monkey Island was a pain with 4 disks. I never even had an external drive :owned:

[Submeg]

Yea I always wondered about that....it's like that for Dragon's Lair...how odd!

[Demon Cleaner]

That is also why the game made me go crazy when I played it, I didn't have a HDD back then. But nowadays installing it to HDD in WinUAE is absolutely no problem, and you can fully enjoy the game without swapping.

[Harrison]

And if you do happen to find a multi disk game that doesn't directly support HD installation, these days it is also easy thanks to WHDLoad as you can now install them to HD. :)

I remember before owning an HD playing some Amiga games on loads of disks and it was quite a nightmare. Some adventure games have their files scattered across the disks in quite a random way making you do 3 or 4 disk swaps within a few seconds of each other at certain points in the games. BASS comes to mind as one of the worst at this. I assume this was to optimise how much they could fit onto each disk, but it didn't make the games very nice to play form floppy disk. Getting an HD for the first time and running these games from it was amazing.

[Buleste]

If i remember rightly with BASS even the install was swapping disks at random. Another bad one although better than others was Simon the Sorcerer and Waxworks (good games though). I remember when i first bought a HDD for my 1200 (a whapping 170MG) and installed these games. I have never been in love like that since.

[Brintinacx]

Is there a tutorial here on how to install to HD?

[Harrison]

Are you playing the game using emulation or a real Amiga? I have a tutorial for HD install that I created a few years ago for the original classicamiga site, and can upload it for you onto the current site tomorrow.

[Brintinacx]

Thanks man, but I figured it out! I am using WinUAE, emulator. I created a hard drive, and installed my games! Night and Day! Superfast! One question though, since I was quite far along in the games, how do I get the new Hard Drived installed version to "see" or "recognize" my save game file on my floppy? I have tried everthing I can think of, but when running the hard drive version, it saves somewhere on the hard drive, even if I have the correct floppy in DF0. I have looked thru the files and can find no save game data from within Workbench. I'm stumped.

[Harrison]

That's great to hear. It's fairly easy to install games to HD on the Amiga as you have discovered.

You can also install a lot that don't come with an installer. If you can see the files in Workbench then you should be able to install them manually. Just create a new directory for the game on the HD, copy the contents of the disks across to the HD, and then edit the s:startup-sequence file on the HD and add some assign commands to the file to point the name of the original game's disks to the location of the files on the HD.

And for games you cannot see in Workbench and that don't come with an installer you can use something called WHDLoad which is a program that allows you to install games that were originally not HD installable. People write installers for specific games for WHDload and you then use these to install the games. Look at http://www.whdload.de/ for more on this if you are interested. And if you do want to investigate this further let me know as there are some other sites I can let you know about that provide much more.

As for save game files, have you selected "show all files" in Workbench for the directories/floppy disks you think the save games should be in? Often the files won't have an icon so you won't see them otherwise.

[Brintinacx]

As for save game files, have you selected "show all files" in Workbench for the directories/floppy disks you think the save games should be in? Often the files won't have an icon so you won't see them otherwise.



That did the trick! I now have my save games from floppy copied to HD! Whoo hoo! Thanks man! Big time saver. You da man....... :thumbs:

[Harrison]

Glad you managed to sort it all out. :)

Give me a shout if you need any more help with installing games to HD in future. I will be adding my existing HD tutorials onto the site very soon and these will include how to manually install a game, and how to install and setup other HD related things.

[lolafg]

:)Hello Harrison ,

I would be very happy with your HD Tutorials , i would like to install Goal in my real Amiga HD , not the whdload one because i have a little config and it doesn't work...so i think that with an install made for it it would run !!
Thanks in advance for your tutorials !!

[Harrison]

Hopefully I should have the time in May to complete the tutorials and get them onto the site.

[Demon Cleaner]

Why do you want to install Goal to HDD anyway?? I mean, it only has 2 disks and boots up very fast. I would understand if you do this for games which have more than 3-4 disks.

[Harrison]

That is a good point, although removing the hassle of needing to use any floppy disks for a game is good even if the game was only on a single disk.

[lolafg]

Hello ,
Thank you for your answers , waiting for your tutorials Harrison ,that will help me a lot , if i want Goal to Hd , it's because my floppy drive may die one day as my originals floppies so an hd install is necessary , and as i have a little config much games don't work with whdload...

[Harrison]

Obviously you do have to remember that even with the tutorials I've written, you can still only install games to HD if you can access the disk's contents from Workbench. If the disk displays as an NDOS disk then the only way to install to HD is by using WHDLoad.

[Demon Cleaner]

Both of the Goal disks are NDOS disks.

[lolafg]

Hello ,

both of the Goal disks are NDOS , but i can acess from workbench to the content of the two disks by extracting all the files with "Dino Dini files system " tool...so if we can do that wouldn't it be possible to install to hdd ?

[Harrison]

That is interesting. If you can extract all of the files with that tool then it might be possible to make the game load from hd.

A quick simple guide to manually getting a game to run from hd is as follows:


create a directory (folder) on your Amiga HD for the game
copy all of the files for the game into this directory
Create a script and icon to launch the game.

Now this final step is the hardest part. First you need to work out which file is used to load the game. You can do this with trial and error by trying to run different files that came with the game until one begins to load the game.

Once you know which file is used to launch the game you can then create a script to do this. This script will do two things. First it will setup some assigns so that the names of the original game's disks point to the correct location on your HD. This way the game will know where to look for files. And secondly we will load the game.

As an example lets say that your game is Blobs, and that the game can be started using the file called Blobs, and the game comes on two disks called Blobs1 and Blobs2. We first need to create a new text file to make our script by pressing right-amiga+E and then typing ed

Now in the script we would add:

c:assign Blobs1: ""
c:assign Blobs2: ""
Blobs

note: you can add assigns to the main workbench s:startup-sequence or s:user-startup files, but as they are only ever needed when you want to load the game it is a much better method to set them up in this script so they are only added to the system when needed. Using the method as shown here, using a specific startup script for each game, and locating this script in the game's main directory, the directory can be located anywhere you like on the HD without needing to re-edit this script with the game's location on the HD.

Then we save the script file, giving it whatever name you would like. In this example we could use run-blobs and save it in the directory with all of the game files.

Next you need to create an icon for use with the game's script that when clicked on will load it. Once that is done you need to save the icon with the same name as your script, and the file extension .info So for example if you named you script run-blobs, then you would name the icon run-blobs.info And after using the window/update menu option you should now see the icon attached to your script file.

Finally you need to edit the icon and add c:iconx as the icon's default tool.

And that should be it. If you have setup the assigns correctly and you have the correct command to load the game setup in your script file then double clicking on the icon should now load and run the game.

I hope this quick guide helps you out. Ask if you have any more questions.

As I said before, a more detailed guide running through this process will be on the main site once I have time to finish it. It will contain screenshots showing the process in more detail by using the installation of a game to HD as an example.

[lolafg]

:)Thank you very much,

I try that and i say you !!!

Hello , i couldn't find the file that launch the game , could you have a look ?

http://rapidshare.com/files/113031619/GOAL1.rar.html
Thanks in advance !!

[lolafg]

;)Up:evil:

[Harrison]

OK. I will take a look when I get back in later tonight for you.

[lolafg]

:thumbs:Thank you Harrison:thumbs:

[lolafg]

:)Hello ,

I have a Goal HD version that works without whdload , but i hadn't still enough memory so i bought a 4mb pcmcia sram card.

If you are interested i can upload this version of Goal (it is the first version without cups).

@Harrison , if you could have a look on it perhaps we could have the version with cups...

So say me if you want i upload this one .

[Harrison]

Sure. I will have a look and see if I can work out how the HD version is working so we can try and get the other version to run from HD.

[lolafg]

:)Hello ,

here is the Goal HD version : http://rapidshare.com/files/114760515/Goal.rar.html

Thanks in advance.

[Harrison]

Looking at the files in the HD version it looks like it is working by having a file image of each of the original Goal disks, named Goal.disk1 and Goal.disk2 and then using a script called GoalHD to load and run the game.

In order to use this to get the other version of the game to run you would need to work out what format/file type these two disk images are in, then create a copy of the other version of the game's two disks in this format and swap them over.

I don't really have time to attempt to do this myself, but I hope you manage to work it out.

[lolafg]

:)Hello Harrison,

I recived my sram card and Goal whdload works perfectly , I have been able to make the data and replays saves working !!
It is the Goal cup version , if you are interested i could upload it...
Say me !!

[Harrison]

That's great news. Glad you finally got it to work.

Is the WHDLoad version included in the KGWHD download packs? If so then don't worry about uploading the version you have as I will already have a copy and everyone can easily grab one from the KGWHD site. If not then please do so it can be shared with everyone.

[lolafg]

:)I don't know wich package it is , but what is sure is that now i have done working replays and data saves wich weren't working in all versions and i have added the French L1 2008 and Serie a 2008 in the first disk !!

this is the link for everyone :

http://rapidshare.com/files/115101038/Goal_whd.rar.html

Tell me what you think about it !!

[Submeg]

hey just a quick thing lolafg,

I'm assuming that English isn't your first language. Buy when you type "say me" I think you're meaning to say "tell me"?

Just so you know :) Got a bit confused the first time :)

[lolafg]

:)You are right english is not my first language...so i'll say now "tell me" :D

[Submeg]

Hehe, nice nice. :)

[Buleste]

An Australian giving English lessons????? Next thing you know they'll be funny!;)

[Submeg]

Hey man, I achieved 19/20 in my year 12 English. I write a lot. So I say good day to you sir.

[Harrison]

But wasn't your English exam marked by an Aussie? ;)

If an Englishman has marked it you would have failed due to all the shortened slang!

[Demon Cleaner]

:)You are right english is not my first language...so i'll say now "tell me" :DAccording to your grammar, I suppose that you're french?

[lolafg]

:)Yes , French and Spanish...so i can speak 3 languages !!!

[Demon Cleaner]

:)Yes , French and Spanish...so i can speak 3 languages !!!Beat you. I speak 4, luxembourgish (native language), german (fluently), french (fluently), english (not so fluently as almost never used).

[Harrison]

You say that, but your written English on here is very good.