English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Two more troublesome HD-installers!

19 November 2010, 12:57

Hope you're all keeping well! It still surprises me that after 15 years people are still talking about these...!

There's a story behind all this confusion and filenames you know...!

The 'Cwuk-Loader.EXE's were my statement to the world that THOU SHALT BUY MORE FAST RAM! :-) I started doing these at school and I needed to get them working on a friends A500/0.5Meg Fast/HD because he was the only one with a modem and I wanted Shadow of the Beast II before anyone else :-) These chip loaders only worked if you booted into a minimal Hard Drive Startup Sequence with nothing else running - we used to have a tool very early on in our Startup Sequence that listed our games so they could be started before anything else... 'Cwuk-Loader' would still use the _LVO's to call into the ROM / Hard Drive routines so if those _LVO's were overwritten by the game all kinds of shaftiness would ensue (I miss the frantic copperlist fireworks and strange hissing noise my friends Multisync monitor would make when things went wrong! So much more exciting than Dr Watson! Ah, the days before MMU's...).

The 'Cwuk-Loader.EXE's hardly worked on any machines, but most of them failed because A-Hole here (ie: moi!) for some reason was saving and writing back out the memory location of the BCPL Pointer (and I've no idea why!). Thrash!/Anthrox pointed that out to me and I was rather embarrassed I did it because it was a trifle obvious... given that I already had a few dozen installers out by this point, I decided to put my routines into a library (MackHDLibrary) so that I could standardize & upgrade the routines later on :-) I eventually patched about 20 games using MackHDLibrary working with a few cracks & trainer combos each, based on feedback from lots of peeps, but I never got around to releasing them because I went to Uni and sold the miggy.

The Fast-Loader's worked on every machine I had access to (we used to test them on A500,A1500/68040 & A1200 before release) because all of the images were loaded into memory and the loaders (already simplified by crackers) were just patched to pull data out of memory. I could never work out or get my hands on a machine where these failed but I know a lot peeps had problems with them from messages I got on Chem's board ('Call the Crimewatch Incident Desk' Soap City BBS... RIP!). As hardware become cheaper, and more 68040+'s were owned, they more or less became unusable.

Oh, yeah, and all of the patches worked only on particular cracks with particular trainers :-) [It used to take a long time to download a DMS file in those days! I couldn't be doing it for all cracks!] A1200 fixes etc. would alter the images and render them un-installable.

Alas!

Nostalgia!

Mars Bar / ex-CWUK (now in Sydney)

19 November 2010, 12:57	#23
marsbar Posts: n/a	Hello! Hope you're all keeping well! It still surprises me that after 15 years people are still talking about these...! There's a story behind all this confusion and filenames you know...! The 'Cwuk-Loader.EXE's were my statement to the world that THOU SHALT BUY MORE FAST RAM! :-) I started doing these at school and I needed to get them working on a friends A500/0.5Meg Fast/HD because he was the only one with a modem and I wanted Shadow of the Beast II before anyone else :-) These chip loaders only worked if you booted into a minimal Hard Drive Startup Sequence with nothing else running - we used to have a tool very early on in our Startup Sequence that listed our games so they could be started before anything else... 'Cwuk-Loader' would still use the _LVO's to call into the ROM / Hard Drive routines so if those _LVO's were overwritten by the game all kinds of shaftiness would ensue (I miss the frantic copperlist fireworks and strange hissing noise my friends Multisync monitor would make when things went wrong! So much more exciting than Dr Watson! Ah, the days before MMU's...). The 'Cwuk-Loader.EXE's hardly worked on any machines, but most of them failed because A-Hole here (ie: moi!) for some reason was saving and writing back out the memory location of the BCPL Pointer (and I've no idea why!). Thrash!/Anthrox pointed that out to me and I was rather embarrassed I did it because it was a trifle obvious... given that I already had a few dozen installers out by this point, I decided to put my routines into a library (MackHDLibrary) so that I could standardize & upgrade the routines later on :-) I eventually patched about 20 games using MackHDLibrary working with a few cracks & trainer combos each, based on feedback from lots of peeps, but I never got around to releasing them because I went to Uni and sold the miggy. The Fast-Loader's worked on every machine I had access to (we used to test them on A500,A1500/68040 & A1200 before release) because all of the images were loaded into memory and the loaders (already simplified by crackers) were just patched to pull data out of memory. I could never work out or get my hands on a machine where these failed but I know a lot peeps had problems with them from messages I got on Chem's board ('Call the Crimewatch Incident Desk' Soap City BBS... RIP!). As hardware become cheaper, and more 68040+'s were owned, they more or less became unusable. Oh, yeah, and all of the patches worked only on particular cracks with particular trainers :-) [It used to take a long time to download a DMS file in those days! I couldn't be doing it for all cracks!] A1200 fixes etc. would alter the images and render them un-installable. Alas! Nostalgia! Mars Bar / ex-CWUK (now in Sydney) Last edited by marsbar; 19 November 2010 at 13:21. Reason: A1200