New to Amiga . . . . Help!
 

Hello All,

Just got my first Amiga computer, an A2000 w/68060 @ 50MHz accelerator made by GVP and a hard drive (not sure what size it is), plus a big box of old games on floppy disks. It seems that most, or all of the games must be played from the floppy disks, as I can't find any directions on how to install them to the hard drive. My question (the first of many to come, I am sure), is, where can I find information on how to preserve games on floppy disks to my hard drive, as it appears that some of the floppy disks have already begun to go bad, and those games are now unplayable?

I am used to consoles, and some Windows PC games, so all of this Amiga stuff is new to me. It looks like this place is a great site for information, but I am suffering from info overload, as there is so much to see and learn.

Noah

Check this first:
http://www.whdload.de/

Also http://hol.abime.net/
may tell you if the game has an installer on any of the disks.

Most Amiga games do not natively install onto hard drive, because it meant they could use fancy disk formats for increased capacity, faster loading and more importantly for software companies, copy protection.

but as someone else has pointed out, www.whdload.de is where you need to direct your browser, you'll find installers for just about any game to get it to run from hard drive, and i'm guessing from your setup, you have plenty of ram as well so there shouldn't be any issues.

www.whdownload.com - has those games, ready for whdload.
so you install whdload 18.2 and download those game archives.
most should work out of the box, others may need some additional files, kickstart.
we are not allowed to share in public - copyright issue -.but one can find them in latest MAME emulator roms sets.

#1) good source for helper tools is aminet.net, for example PKAzip for those game archives from the site above.

#2) about those old games, offten discussed here, some topics for example:
Floppy Disks: Testing, Recovering, Reusing and Recycling
Recovering/Saving Bad Amiga Disks
Mouldy floppy disks...

Welcome.

Most of the games released on the Amiga, especially early, were not written to be hard drive installable. :( The exceptions were usually simulators, or games that came on lots of floppies anyway.

The good news is, there are a couple of routes to get them to load faster. One has already been mentioned.

Another way is to read the disks off into ADF (Amiga Disk Format) and then store them on a USB stick, plugged into a Gotek drive adapted for use with the Amiga.

The Gotek plugs into the floppy port, replacing the floppy drive, but reads a little faster. The Amiga can't tell the difference and thinks it's still loading from Floppy.

Treasure that 060 card, there's not many of them around anymore, working. ;)

I suggest you start my making a list of the games you have. Most if not all of them will be downloadable anyway. You might have a very rare game, so you can check yourself if there's a version available or not. If you have a list, an inventory of the disks you have.

Don't panic about the floppies degrading. Chances are, it's all on the net already.