generic KickStarter for WHDLoad

[tomcat666]

Hi Everyone.

Since I am installing HD games to my A1200 like crazy lately (holydays rule) I have stumbled across a HD install which seems to use a generic .slave.
It uses a 512k512k.slave slave and the info says it is Kickstater slave... when I look in the .info it has a CUSTOM1=2 tooltype, which, presumably, means it uses two disk images.

Anyway, I have not found any info on the net about this, and since some of you guys do HD installs with WHDLoad I would like to know if there is a updated version of this on the net and maybe some more info about it ?

I could get some games working with this, most of them still suffer from badly written CPU loops and such, but some of them run pretty good, anyway better than with any degrader.

I hope to have more time in the future to do some installs myself, but it has been more than 10 years since I did any Amiga stuff, and even that was writing demos, but we will see ;-)

Best regards,
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[Codetapper]

(Cue background pan flute music)...

Back in about 1998 Wepl decided to patch the kickstart ROM for the A500 so it would work with some Dos games since OSEmu doesn't emulate all dos functions properly and a lot of games wouldn't run.

He made 3 routines, 512k.slave, 512k512k.slave and 1M.slave which are obviously how much chip/fast memory you have. YOu are correct in assuming CUSTOM1 is the number of disks to use.

As far as I know, these are the only general slaves ever released - and by released I was under the impression they were only for developers and were not supposed to be spread. This is because we don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry grabbing the said slave and hex editing the title to say the game name when it's just a generic patch. Otherwise the WHDLoad site would be flooded with patches which appear to work to start with but have no actual bugs fixed with the game (empty loops, blitter waits etc).

New kickdos routines have now been written by Wepl and Jeff which almost completely emulate the 1.3 Rom with all Dos calls working, but these haven't been compiled into a generic patch. The WHDLoad authors have access to the source to change them but that is it.

Hope that helps!

[tomcat666]

Hi!

Thanks for the info. I tought it might be something like that, since there was no info on the net and the game I got the 512k512k.slave was from a cracked game. Anyway, it would be nice for a generic .slave to be released so users without any knowledge can maybe make some of their favorite games for which there is no install work.
For example TVSports Basketball original (from Cinemaware site) works perfectly fine with the generic slave from Rocket Ranger... and there is no good HD install for that game yet.
A new generic patch would really come in handy.

Best regards,
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