I want to give Amiga Emulation one last chance, please help (WoT)

I got a complete 10GB Amiga ROM set back in 2003, I tried to get the games to work back then and failed miserably, I decided to never try Amiga emulation again because getting this stuff up and running was a major waste of time for me.

A couple days ago I found my ROMs which I misplaced long ago, and decided to give Amiga emulation another try, this time hoping I would be able to find some decent guides or just figure things out as I go. Unfortunately the experience I've had in the past couple days has been anything but enjoyable, tormenting would be an understatement lol

Now let ol' GL start from the beginning. I found some guide on how to install some AIAB/WorkBench OS on a virtual HDD in WinUAE I use VMWare a lot so I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing, i got the OS installed and running in no time, I thought that's all I needed to play games.

So I have a bunch of kickstart ROMs ready, an installed OS and 10 gigs worth of ROMs, I copy the ROMs to my HDD and lo and behold, mounting the games to the virtual floppy drives in the emulator while the OS is running does nothing, and even if it decides to detect something was mounted it won't execute the program or let me browse the disc. Fine, I figure I don't need the OS and try running games without it, it seems I made some progress at this point because some games actually started booting up, though all would usually mess up after the cracktro/trainer screens. It was a frustrating and never ending struggle to get anything working, I was at a complete loss I don't know the first thing about Amiga yet this highly advanced emulator expects me to be some super nerd with nerves of steel to run simple games.

Well, I did get two games running today Clystron(I like the C64 version better) and shadow of the Beast, apparently to get them running I had to set up the emulator for each game individually...WTF Well after 3-4 days of problems with running games, control problems, games not detecting disks and games only playing sound and not displaying anything after the intro/trainer.

After trying to get anything working properly and failing safe for two games I just about had it and deleted the 10gigs of ROMs I had(I still have em burned lol) So I want to give Amiga emulation one last chance before I call it quits for good, please help me out guys. I'm just a gamer dude who wants to copy his ROMs to his HDD, get a list of games, pick the ones he wants to play and have 'em working. I'm not a big fan of tinkering with computers, I hate stuff like that so tell me, is there a simple workaround for this or not? I was told to get some GameBase thingie, but I can't seem to find that anywhere.

EDIT: WTF where did my paragraphs go o_O this is going to be impossible to read like this.

EDIT2: Well damn lol, apparently the post was messed up with no paragraphs and stuff because I didn't enable Javascript on the site.
Hope some of the people who saw it being such a mess before will come back and read it now and help me out.

[musashi5150]

If you choose "A500" from the Quickstart section and insert your virtual disk the vast majority of your games will run with that configuration.

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by GurrenLagann

I was told to get some GameBase thingie, but I can't seem to find that anywhere.

You can get it here.

Originally Posted by musashi5150

If you choose "A500" from the Quickstart section and insert your virtual disk the vast majority of your games will run with that configuration.

But isn't that like the oldest Amiga model? Doesn't that mean my games will have crappy graphics on it, or does that not matter? I want to play the games but I also want them to look their best and everything.

Guys I could really use some more guidance on this stuff.

And Graham, thanks a lot man I'll get the gamebase thing from there.

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by GurrenLagann

But isn't that like the oldest Amiga model? Doesn't that mean my games will have crappy graphics on it, or does that not matter? I want to play the games but I also want them to look their best and everything.

Well every game pre-1993 is designed for the A500 so they won't look any better on an A1200 (and I'm not sure about "crappy graphics" either; there are plenty of games that look absolutely stunning). And there are plenty of older titles that won't even run on an A1200 directly anyway.

Practically everything after 1992 should run on an A1200, but they won't be enhanced unless the title either autodetects the AGA chipset and enhances itself or you run AGA-specific titles.

I should've known this won't be as easy as installing the gamebase amiga thing and playing lol, nothing Amiga related seems to be easy and I've been using emulators and ROMs for normal systems for years now.

Alright, so I installed the gamebase with no problems and now when I select the path where my ROMs are and go to verify the files it says none of the games were found, WTF I have like 10 gigs of ROMs in there.

The only two reasons I can think of that might be causing this is either the files aren't named properly so the thing can't detect them or it doesn't want them to be in zip format which is just stupid.

Here's an example of how some of these files have been named:
c.y.a.d. - a game of influence (1991)(j. newcombe).zip
coala (1995)(empire)[cr hlm][t +4 atx](disk 2 of 3)(aga data).zip

Maybe I need an auto-renamer or something that could detect which ROMs are in the zip files and name them accordingly?

[Belgarath]

GameBase Amiga only recognises specific versions of games (i.e. the best working ones), as you have a fair amount of adfs already your best bet is to run the dat which you can from http://gbamiga.elowar.com/files/@Mai...s%20(v1.5).zip

And then use it with a tool like ClrMAMEPro http://www.clrmame.com/ and run it on your collection.

You guys are so much help, thanks a lot, I'll give that a try
Sorry about all this, but I've never had to deal with anything this complicated before and as I said I don't really have the patience to mess around with computer related stuff much.

I can play a Japanese RPG for over 100 hours or any RPG for that matter, but I don't have the slightest bit of patience when it comes to getting things to work lol, like I don't get pissed or anything I just lose the will to work on this kinda stuff when it's too complex, fortunately so far none of the emulators I've tired have been THIS complex or hard to set up and I have tons of emulators for all kinds of systems both on PC and my modded Xbox.

Well thanks a lot, hope this works.

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by GurrenLagann

none of the emulators I've tried have been THIS complex or hard to set up

That's because the Amiga is a proper machine

[BippyM]

GurrenLagann the best option is to pop onto IRC and then one of the ever-so friendly chaps/chapettes will gladly guide you through setting up and running a few games and/or setups

I am pretty busy dealing with a family issue right now so I am away for about another week, but I assure you if you poke about on their you'll be up and running in no time

Thanks guys, but it appears I really can't deal with this now, not even that ClrMAMEPro did it for me, I STRONGLY doubt that out of 10 gigs worth of files none are the best/correct versions, I got the ClrMAMEPro thing, then the data files and when I let it scan it started whining about some stuff I can't even begin to understand.

Screw this, maybe I'll give it another chance some other time, but I'm honestly sick and tired of this, it's just not worth it for me because it seems to be downright impossible for me to get this working.

The only option I see left for me is to track down a nice, clean ROM Set and use that, apparently what I have here is either not good enough or these programs can't detect any of this stuff for some reason.

boy what a waste of valuable time this has been.

sorry everyone and thanks.

[BippyM]

I tell ya mate

Get on IRC

The Amiga was a very complex machine, and WinUAE tries to emulate most of the models.

It is difficult to get into for a newbie, but once you figure it out you'll be on your way!

[cosmicfrog]

well heres my 2pence worth. ROM stands for read only memory, then you probably knew that, adfs are disc images. the rom files you need are kickstart roms 1.3, 3.0, 3.1 etc they go in the rom folder.

some amiga games do infact work with out haveing these roms but i have no idea which.

I personaly feel you are trying to hard and making it more complicated than it realy is, though given a few pertinent questions I`m sure you`ll sort it out, after all 10 gig is a lot of games 2 play

[Andec]

@GurrenLagann
Don't give up mate. I am sure we can sort it out and get you playing classic games in no time.

It seems to me that it you are suffering a configuration problem. Perhaps you are trying to load the ADF's (into ROM space) instead of the Kickstart ROMS (or vice versa).

[musashi5150]

Maybe checkout this thread too: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=36292 might be just what you need.

[TCD]

Hi musashi5150,

my program needs the configurations already set up (think it's a good point to make a 'Setup configuration' button ).
So sadly it won't help him
But maybe this can help him getting started : http://ale.emuunlim.com/guides/winuae-setup.shtml