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killergorilla · 12 August 2008, 14:14

Hi mate, bit of a coincidence eh

I'll deal with your points one by one...

In WinUAEX, I have 2 hdfs for each game. One called _whdload.hdf (the underscore to keep it at the top of the list. And one with the game name.

It means a little more setting up because you have to add 2 hdfs for each game but you only have to do it once for each game so it's not too difficult.

The _whdload.hdf is simply a few files (cd, whdload, setpatch, whdload.key and a few more I can't think of...). It has a startup-sequence which pretty much says:

CD game: (all my hdf's are named "game")
WHDLoad SLAVE=game.slave PRELOAD

This then starts the game. Pretty simple really. It means you can update the whdload file in the single hdf if a new version is released.

This does have the flaw that if you want to run any specific tooltypes you'll need another _whdload_custom1.hdf or whatever but the standard preload tooltypes work for 99% of the games.

As for zipping up the hdf files, I tried this and had massive problems. Your configs will strangely forget where the hdf files are. No idea why, but if I setup a couple of hdf files and then loaded the game, the next time I came to load that game it wouldn't load. I did some testing and discovered it was due to the zipped hdf files.

As for multiple slaves, I've recently made a database of all the games in my packs and what slaves/icons they have, and there are only about 8 games which have multiple slaves. This isn't really a problem as it's much easier to just manually create these ones.

As for savestates, yeah it's a good idea. Here's what I do...

Setup the game and load it until the title screen.
Make a savestate.
Set auto load last save state in winuaex. (so it loads really quickly next time)
Enable "NoWriteCache" in whdload.prefs

This means whenever you edit the high scores, edit your characters, save your game (non-savestate) etc. it writes immediately to the hdf, and then when you have decided you want to finish your game, just save the state again (over the previous one) and exit.

That way your savestates will never conflict with the information stored on the hdf.

Oh and another thing, I'd recommend you put a blank adf file in DF0: whenever you are loading an hdf, it speeds up loading a LOT because there is a bug in winuaex which thinks the entire disk drive has been removed if there is nothing in DF0: . This leads to massive wait times while the amiga figures out there is no floppy drive.

Oh and one last thing... I tested my script with 102 whdload games, it converted them in 20 minutes which isn't too bad. I now have about 250 lined up to be converted!

12 August 2008, 14:14	#191
killergorilla Lesser Talent Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: UK Age: 42 Posts: 7,957	Hi mate, bit of a coincidence eh I'll deal with your points one by one... In WinUAEX, I have 2 hdfs for each game. One called _whdload.hdf (the underscore to keep it at the top of the list. And one with the game name. It means a little more setting up because you have to add 2 hdfs for each game but you only have to do it once for each game so it's not too difficult. The _whdload.hdf is simply a few files (cd, whdload, setpatch, whdload.key and a few more I can't think of...). It has a startup-sequence which pretty much says: CD game: (all my hdf's are named "game") WHDLoad SLAVE=game.slave PRELOAD This then starts the game. Pretty simple really. It means you can update the whdload file in the single hdf if a new version is released. This does have the flaw that if you want to run any specific tooltypes you'll need another _whdload_custom1.hdf or whatever but the standard preload tooltypes work for 99% of the games. As for zipping up the hdf files, I tried this and had massive problems. Your configs will strangely forget where the hdf files are. No idea why, but if I setup a couple of hdf files and then loaded the game, the next time I came to load that game it wouldn't load. I did some testing and discovered it was due to the zipped hdf files. As for multiple slaves, I've recently made a database of all the games in my packs and what slaves/icons they have, and there are only about 8 games which have multiple slaves. This isn't really a problem as it's much easier to just manually create these ones. As for savestates, yeah it's a good idea. Here's what I do... Setup the game and load it until the title screen. Make a savestate. Set auto load last save state in winuaex. (so it loads really quickly next time) Enable "NoWriteCache" in whdload.prefs This means whenever you edit the high scores, edit your characters, save your game (non-savestate) etc. it writes immediately to the hdf, and then when you have decided you want to finish your game, just save the state again (over the previous one) and exit. That way your savestates will never conflict with the information stored on the hdf. Oh and another thing, I'd recommend you put a blank adf file in DF0: whenever you are loading an hdf, it speeds up loading a LOT because there is a bug in winuaex which thinks the entire disk drive has been removed if there is nothing in DF0: . This leads to massive wait times while the amiga figures out there is no floppy drive. Oh and one last thing... I tested my script with 102 whdload games, it converted them in 20 minutes which isn't too bad. I now have about 250 lined up to be converted!