WhDload in A600 with A603

[Tiago]

I now have one A603 that puts my A600 at 2MB Ram.
i receive it today and must find some time to setup it and also a 2.5 HD.

Before i buy my 8mb ram card and blizzard 1230 for my both A1200 i was not able to play all games in A1200+WhDload. may 50% of them. Of course after i put extra 8MB Ram i am able to run everything.

so, in A600 with 2Mb Ram and looking at the 68000 less speed will i be able to play in WhDload about what? 30% 40% of games?

And with the new card from zetr0 (2+8 mb ram)? will i be able to run all games even the CPU is not a 020 or 030... ?

[Harrison]

With just 2MB Chip ram I found my A600 struggled to run a lot of WHDLoad installed games. Disabling the WHDLoad cache (which loads the whole game image into memory before it runs) helps get many more to load, but a lot still won't work as they system runs out of memory.

But with 2MB Chip and 2MB Fast (via a PCMCIA 2MB SRAM card) it has been able to run all non AGA games I've tested. So yes, with the 8MB Fast ram expansion it will run all none AGA games fine.

[Tiago]

Disabling the WHDLoad cache ???
How do you do that? i didn't saw before any option like that...
Does it take a bit longer to launch the game? (if he puts all into memory....)

[Harrison]

By default WHDLoad works this way. loading all the disk images and supporting files for a game into ram to speed up in game read access. It is a bit slower to initially launch the game, but it is faster once loaded. Loading from HDD during the game isn't that much slower though.

To disable this feature you just need to remove a flag called "Preload"

To change the WHDLoad settings globally you can edit the S:WHDLoad.prefs file. Just look for the "PreLoad" entry and comment it out with a ;

Or for individual games you can remove the "Preload" entry for that game by editing a Game's Icon Tooltypes.

To get a full run down of all supported WHDload flags have a look here (http://www.whdload.de/docs/en/opt.html).

You can also set any of the supported flags when launching a WHDLoad game from the CLI as you would in DOS. Just add the flags required after the launch command.

[Tiago]

Great info Harrison. :)

[Andrew1971]

Hi All
I cant find the preload entry in the WHDLoad prefs. As i have the same problem with running ouy of memory only 2mb on my A1200.
Many Thanks
Andrew1971

[Harrison]

WHDLoad has a main master presets setting list that is normally in the WHDLoad installed folder. I forget what it is called. If the settings are not present for the individual game's launcher then it will use the default main settings in this file. Have a look in the WHDLoad documents as it should say where it is and what to edit.

However, in the current versions of ClassicWB there is an early boot feature that allows you to run a commandline only version of Workbench, and it also has a special WHDLoad loader that can launch all the games on the HDD with minimal system resources so the Amiga has as much memory as possible for the games. This method allows nearly all games to load on a 2MB A600. Details of this should be on the ClassicWB site.

[Andrew1971]

Cheers Harrison for the info got a few games working now:)
Many Thanks
Andrew1971