WHDLoad noob questions

[beanz]

Hi,

I've looked at the FAQ and can't really find an answer to my noobish questions (or I am completely missing them).

I been transferring ADFs to disk but its a real pain so I thought I would look into WHDload what I know very little about except the basics that it helps install games to HD etc.

So my questions.

I have a A500 with a A590HD (with a 2.1gb hd in it) and 2.5mb ram. The OS is versions 2.0 (or 2.01..dont quite remember).
Can I run WHDLoad on this or is it only for 'better' machines?

How would I go about getting the downloaded WHDLoad onto my Amiga for installation...using the same transfer method I use for ADFs? (its been a while since I did this but I have a program somewhere that uses a serial cable to transfer from PC etc).

If I can get answers to these 2 questions I think I can figure out the rest..thanks.

[fryguy]

I think it should work on an A500 as well, never tried it myself though as i don't have enough RAM in mine. Yep you could just transer the games with parnet, sernet or AmigaExplorer or similar.

[alkis21]

OS2.0 should not be a problem, but I don't know how many games you will manage to run with only 2.5MB of RAM. I guess you won't know until you try. I remember that very few games worked for me when I only had 2MB of RAM in my A1200. And yes, a serial cable will work fine.

[beanz]

Thanks for the info..I'll give it a try.

[Wepl]

the question is if you have 0.5 or 1 mb chip ram, with the latter most ocs games should work, with the former maybe half of the ocs games
make sure you have a lean wb or start the whdload without startup-sequence

[StevenJGore]

Might be quicker to connect the hard disk to a PC and set everything up in WinUAE?

[beanz]

the question is if you have 0.5 or 1 mb chip ram, with the latter most ocs games should work, with the former maybe half of the ocs games
make sure you have a lean wb or start the whdload without startup-sequence

Not sure about the technical question. I have an A500 with the A501 expansion and then the a590 with 2mb onboard that.

So the WHDload games all load in one lump rather that incrementally?....so if its a 6 disk game for example it wont work due to lack of memory?

As for the hooking up to a PC I might look into doing that at some point but its a scsi drive and I don't have a scsi card in my pc right now.

[fryguy]

You could run the games without preload (so it loads data when needed) but that usually makes the screen "flicker" when loading.

[Akira]

You could run the games without preload (so it loads data when needed) but that usually makes the screen "flicker" when loading.

That's the thing, disable preload and you can run them pretty much in any 2MB machine.

Never noticed screen flickrs but did notice longer loading times of courtse

[Wepl]

Not sure about the technical question. I have an A500 with the A501 expansion and then the a590 with 2mb onboard that.

So the WHDload games all load in one lump rather that incrementally?....so if its a 6 disk game for example it wont work due to lack of memory?

so you will have 0.5 MB chip and 2 MB fast, several later released games will require 1 mb and for the slave authors it's usually easier to make a slave for 1 mb chip than for 0.5 chip + 0.5 fast
so you will find some install which wont run on this setup...

if you have set PRELOAD whdload will try to load all files at the beginning, if there is not enough memory it will read as much as possible. if the game requests a file which is not preloaded/cached whdload will then load it from disk this time. this causes some flickering because whdload has to enable the os for this.
depending on the game there may be less (loads small big chunks) or a lot of flickering (many files or small parts of a disk image).