Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
WHDLoadArchiveFS is the smaller component though, the heavy lifting is done on the WHDLoad side
Frankly it would be awesome if it could load everything from the archive, but this would require some non-trivial changes to WHDLoad. For example it would need a new way to start the package and some sort of a way to find the slave(s) and info(s) from the archive.
That would require quite a lot of work from Wepl and I do not even know whether it would be feasible, but if he ever plans to do it, I will support that from my side.
<advertisement>
However, there is (almost) completely unrelated project I've been working on my free time that I plan to release as a beta after summer that would be exactly what you want: I've finally got a working system where I implemented WHDLoad-APIs in emulator side (currently in FS-UAE, but it works with uaenative, so it should work with most UAE-based emulators, as long as uaenative is enabled)
This does not require any external kickstart roms, not even Aros. (unless install itself requires those). And it loads installs from lha/zip-archive into emulator after a reset. Fun stuff.
Only save-files are currently missing as well as builds to various systems (and polish maybe). I tossed out all the MMU-stuff except simple CACR/TT/ITT settings but otherwise it is on par* with WHDLoad 18.6. I am pretty sure I can finish it when I have again some capacity
stay tuned.
* There are some things I have not implemented and/or I have not been able to test since they have not came across in the real installs like printfs/logs/complex relocates. Also there are some gremlins on the higher end of the CPUs (68040+) but games rarely need those.
PS. if someone is running FS-UAE on mac x64 and really committed being a guinea pig for alpha releases, let me know.
</advertisement>