[jotd]

Originally Posted by liveevil

This sounds fantastic ! As it's a Windows tool does that mean that all the WHDLoad games have to be extracted ?

The input isn't any packs or whatever. You have to unpack games, and keep the relevant slave & data dir (or you get an error when processing)

Originally Posted by liveevil

I know that a few of the games don't extract properly on a Windows filesystem. There is a short list of the ones that have problems on the server under 'Unpack on Amiga' but I extracted several of Retroplay's LHA files to my PC and got some different results.

I know some (Puzznic, Batman): spaces at the end of the name, other strange chars which also prevents ISO burning, but installs/slaves have been fixed to use more standard filenames.

Originally Posted by liveevil

I found that I needed to extract them with WinRAR because if you use 7zip it doesn't keep the empty directories, WinRAR does. Also there were a lot that left files on my PC that I couldn't delete, I had to use a special program to delete them. These were not listed on the server as 'Unpack on Amiga'.

must be some KG packs. I'm not supporting those directly. You could report that to him.

Originally Posted by liveevil

This is a similar tool to what Cyberhead97 is writing but yours seems to be a lot lot easier to use (hopefully !). So could you give more info on how it works ? Does it create a bootable PFS3 HDF file as a result ? Can it scan multiple game directories ? Looking forward to your work. Thanks.

The tool cannot create HDF files (I'm interested if someone has some python script to do that), it just takes a "GAMES" (or other) root dir (or multi-root dir), and scans for slaves in it.
It computes the ID of the games from the slaves, and creates AGS menus from all the slaves at the same level.

Ex: if you have C:\foo\bar\MY_HD\GAMES, it creates startup seq, all required dirs in C:\foo\bar\MY_HD. So when you start winuae you just select this dir, make it "bootable", and it works.

If you want it to work on a real miggy, then mount this partition, your system & your amiga HD drive in Winuae and copy all the files to your fresh amiga HD (CD32load HD mode needs FFS only, WHDload mode can use any format, PFS..)

Special CD32Load mode features looking up game name in a built-in database to set the proper joypad/keys mapping (can be a lot of work to do manually).
It also tries to find a relevant image in the internal IFF image base. There's a good % of success on known games.

It can also take a kickstarts directory as input, to copy on the DEVS/Kickstarts dir of the target.

Extra tools developped with other EAB members allow to create an ISO image. That's not built-in in the tool for now but that will be done if enough need it.