Installing games to A1200 HD

[toomanymikes]

Hi everyone
I was looking for advice on transferring amiga games on disk to the hard drive of my A1200. I have zero knowledge of programming so I need some 'explain it to me like I'm a child' tutorial. Can anyone direct me to such a thing if it exists?
I have looked at WHDload but im a bit (substitute very) confused - do you install this program to the PC or the Amiga HD and if you have games on disk how do you get them from the disk onto the Amiga HD? I also stumbled across info on ADF files as a common format - am i right in thinking that this is the file type used by Amiga disks and if I was to copy an ADF file from my PC onto a 720kb disk that the Amiga would be able to load it? I bet its not that easy...
Help!

[Harrison]

OK. First I will explain ADF files to you.

An ADF (Amiga Disk Format) is a track by track file image of the original Amiga floppy disk. These were invented because only Amiga floppy drive controllers are capable of reading or writing real Amiga formatted floppy disks. So the ADF image format was made so that emulators could access them.

It is possible to read ADF files on a real Amiga, but only if they are disks accessible from workbench. You can get a device driver that allows you to mount ADF files on an Amiga so they then appear in Workbench as a virtual floppy disk (much like mounting a CD ISO images in a virtual drive on the PC). But as I said, this is limited only to accessing standard Amiga DOS formatted floppies, so you cannot access most game ADFs as they use special custom formats. (If you did want to try this you can get this device driver from Aminet in the http://aminet.net/disk/misc area).

For non dos disks you will first need to convert the ADF files back into real Amiga floppy disks. To do that I recommend using the free Amiga utility ADFBlitzer. You can find it on Aminet at http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/adfblitzer All you have to do is load this utility on your Amiga, put a blank floppy disk in the Amiga's drive, select the ADF file you have copied to your Amiga, and ADFBlitzer will write the disk image back onto the floppy disk. You can then use it as you would the original disk.

ADFBlitzer can also make ADF files from Amiga floppy disks, and the ADF format is a great way to back up original Amiga floppy disks in case any become corrupted at a later date.

There are also some other ADF utilities on Aminet that do a similar task, so if you find ADFBlitzer won't run properly with some ADFs or you cannot get the program to work then you should try the others on offer. ADF2DISK is another quite good one, and TransADF is another which is a CLI utility but with a GUI available.

Next installing games to HD. Many Amiga games did come with HD installers so check all of the disks that come with a game just to make sure there isn't a proper Amiga HD installer on them. Normally if you can access and see the contents of a game's disks it means it will run from HD perfectly well and a lot of the time will contain a HD installer somewhere on the disks.

Alternatively if you can access and see the contents of the disks but there isn't a HD installer included you can manually install the game to HD. To do this you just need to copy all of the contents from all of the disks for the game into a folder on your HD (make sure you select show all files if you are copying using drag and drop. A better method is to copy using the Shell to make sure you copy all files from the floppy disks). Then the only other step needed is to tell the game where to find the files on the HD. To do this you need to edit your startup-sequence file. Just type "ed s:startup-sequence" to do this. You will need to add some lines near the bottom of the file just before the WBLoad line which redirect the game to the correct location for the files it is looking for.

To do this you need to add an assign command for each of the disks the game came on.

For example, if the game came on two disks and they were named "Leaderboard1" and "Leaderboard2", and you had copied their contents to the HD in the location "DH0:Leaderboard" then you would need to add the following two lines to your startup-sequence file:

Assign Leaderboard1: DH0:Leaderboard
Assign Leaderboard2: DH0:Leaderboard

As you can see you are first assigning the name of each disk and then where it is redirected too. And that is all that is needed. You should then be able to go into your game's folder on the HD and double click the game's program icon to start the game.

Finally for games that are not HD installable as standard you need to use WHDLoad. First you need to download the WHDLoad package and install it onto your Amiga. Next you need to download the WHDLoad installer for each of the games you wish to install to HD. Finally you need to run these HD Installers and they will ask for each of the original game's disks one by one and copy them to your HD. Once complete you should then have a copy of the game installed on your HD with an icon to launch the game.

With WHDLoad you have to remember than many cracked copies of games found on ADF will not work with the WHDLoad installer as they are looking for exact disk file sizes when they try to install the games and because the cracked games have been altered they will fail to install. Some will work, but many wont. You can also get hold of the CAPS disk image set that will work with WHDLoad.

CAPS (Classic Amiga Preservation Society), which has recently changed its name to SPS (Software Preservation Society) due to now archiving other system software too, concentrates on only making images of original unaltered disks so all of the disks in their archive are original commercial uncracked versions. These should therefore all work with WHDLoad. They are harder to find for download, but if you want to find them send me a PM and I will point you in the right direction.

I hope that all made sense.

[toomanymikes]

Thats fantastic advice Harrison. I'll see how I get on and if I get stuck I'll send you a PM re the SPS.

Cheers!

[toomanymikes]

Hi, I’m almost too embarrassed to write this but I’m stuck – how do you access the hard drive on the Amiga? Do you have to load up the workbench and get to it from there? I did load it up but I couldn’t see anything obvious that suggested it was the HD. Also, is there any way to install the workbench on the HD so I don’t have to put in the disk?
My worry is that when I got the A1200 the keyboard and HD connector cables had come loose – thanks Royal Mail – so I had to open the case up and reconnect them and now I think the HD may have been damaged in transit.

[Demon Cleaner]

You should see the HD, perhaps it's not formatted yet. Of course you should install WB to the HD, so it boots in less than 10 seconds. Just install 3.1 and it will automatically boot from the HD.

[Harrison]

If the HD is unformatted it should appear in Workbench as a NDOS: icon. If you can see this then just select it and format it.

If however you cannot even see this then the HD hasn't been partitioned yet and you will need to get hold of some Amiga partition software on floppy disk in order to do this.

As for installing Workbench to HD, there are manual and automatic methods for doing this. The simplest way is to just copy all of the contents of the Workbench 3 floppy disk into the root of the HD. The Amiga will then just boot from HD. But to get a full install of Workbench onto the HD you can either manually copy the contents of the whole Workbench 3 disk set onto the HD or use the Workbench 3 install disk that comes as part of the full disk set.

[toomanymikes]

Update: I contacted the seller who told me that the A1200 should boot up on to the workbench from the hd as soon as its turned on. I checked again and it turns out that the HD ribbon was not fully inserted into the motherboard - a quick press solved this and now it boots up onto the workbench (wow - I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about). Fantastic! Plus the guy sent a disk with relokick 1.3 so I can reboot it load older games from disk. Happy days!
So all is good you may think, and it is - but I have more questions... The drive comes with the usual workbench folders plus some ones that the seller had preloaded onto it. I get the impression that the guy was pretty into his utilities but as you can probably tell - I aint got a clue! So I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on what they are / do. The folder names are as follows:

Quarterback V7
DMS
UNDMS
Directory OPUS
DMSWB (its icon has DMSII written on it)
Install_Log_File

Any ideas?

[v85rawdeal]

Quarterback:
Back-up Utility
Advanced backup and archiving program for the Amiga. While hard drives represent some of the highest technology that exists in the computer industry, all hard drives will eventually fail. It is not a matter of if, but simply a question of when. If you've invested hours creating pictures, manuscripts, 3-D ray-traces, or spreadsheets, then you need some way to protect your investment. Quarterback gives you that protection by safeguarding your work against any possible loss.

DMS/UnDMS:
Converts .dms Amiga disk images to uncompressed .adf images
This package includes undms, a decompressor for the Amiga DMS disk image format. It outputs ".adf" (11 sector per track, 80 tracks, 512 bytes/sector) uncompressed disk images which may be written directly to disk on NetBSD/amiga or used with an Amiga emulator.

DMSWB:
DMSWB is a Workbench based version of DMS. It works just like DMS but is iconbased.
DMSWB has more advantages, such as being multitasking, so you can write a DMS file, while you're viewing the information about it, or you can compress a disk using another drive. Because DMSWB can do 4 commands at a time, you have 4 information outputs on the right side of the DMSWB window.

DirectoryOpus:
File Management Software
Directory Opus is the best and most productive file manager for the Amiga. All actions like moving, deleting, extracting etc can be done faster and easier with this program. The PC version is also top-notch.

Install_log_file sounds like just some references for software installations.

Hope that helps! If it doesn't, I am sure that someone else will clarify anything I have got wrong!

[Demon Cleaner]

DMSWB is a Workbench based version of DMS.

[toomanymikes]

Thanks guys - does that mean that the DMSWB utility can write amiga disks that can be loaded on the disk drive from .dms files, similar to Harrison's suggestion of ADFBlitzer?