Workbench boot vs Direct boot

[Steam Ranger]

What are the advantages of a game or application booting directly, as compared to being run from Workbench?

[derSammler]

More available RAM maybe?

[daxb]

It depends. Do you talk about a floppy disk game or something else? Does the game takeover the system or is it system friendly? On what system (requirements) should it run?

[Seiya]

loading from workbench you lose memory and if you have only 1 MB maybe you have no chance to run a game that with 1 MB start from direct Boot.
Some games that require to start from WB, this latter usally is a minimal workbench with few libraries and few commands and simple startup-sequence.

[Thomas Richter]

And some games can be installed on harddisks. And some people want to trigger a useless discussion.

[huggy70]

>> And some people want to trigger a useless discussion

You mean like that endless debate in "asm vs c" thread?

[zx80]

Originally Posted by huggy70

>> And some people want to trigger a useless discussion

You mean like that endless debate in "asm vs c" thread?

[malko]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

And some games can be installed on harddisks. And some people want to trigger a useless discussion.

[Steam Ranger]

I'm asking this question as it seems that most games boot from floppy disk. Workbench is much more convienient, so it leads me to wonder why they perceive direct booting as a better thing?

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

I'm asking this question as it seems that most games boot from floppy disk. Workbench is much more convienient, so it leads me to wonder why they perceive direct booting as a better thing?

There can be more than one reason, depending on the type of game.

As you've been told, if you have an Amiga with 1MB, after you run the Workbench you're left with about 800/900k, so any games that require more than 900k won't work.

Same for an A1200, some AGA games require more RAM than the Workbench has left.

Another reason is that some applications run from the workbench might dirty Ram and thus get artefacts or game lock-ups.

Then there are the NoDOS games where you cannot run them from the Workbench unless you use WHDLoad.

Finally, there are games that cannot be installed on HD because they require game data 'only' from the floppy.

[daxb]

Nowadays there is no need for games on floppy disks. If someone does it than it was/is a conscious decision because of nostalgic reason or such. Back in the days the situation was a bit different.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

What are the advantages of a game or application booting directly, as compared to being run from Workbench?

You're asking the wrong question (mostly). (But let me answer in the spirit I think it was meant.)
Those two methods are (usually) not the same thing. One uses the OS for its functions, the other is an OS in and of itself (albeit minimal).
(Yes, there are exceptions; you can be booting and trackloading fully using the OS, but you're still not letting the OS complete its bring-up and there is no interface for triggering a start of a bootblock-loader floppy from a fully booted OS (well, I bet there exists some tool that will try and do just that, but there is no official one)).

They're different animals, and the decision of what you can do with them is not up to you, that was made by the developer when the game was made. If you want to see an extreme example of this, you can look at Dragon's Lair which actually replaces the Kickstart if you have an A1000 (AFAIK you can skip that if you want to and have extra memory).

The advantage of the bootblock-loader is to treat the Amiga mostly like a games console: You know exactly how much memory you have and you do not have to give up any of that to the OS. The OS can take up arbitrarily much memory and it can be hard to know how much memory you can expect to be free so you might have to be a bit conservative in your estimates or up your memory requirements when working with the OS. You can also use your own custom disk format that can be faster/easier/more available space than the official OFS.
The advantage of an OS based game is that you get fixes and patches in place before being started, which can boost performance majorly for those with more than a minimal spec.

Addendum:
Strictly speaking, if a developer wanted to go the extra mile (it would be interesting to know if any did), you can have a floppy with a fully valid filesystem, having an executable program on that you can start from the OS, that would then take over the OS and then load the bootblock-loader(or replicate its functionality) and start from there as if you booted from it - basically what I described as the tool that might exist.
If this sounds familiar to you, then that is in large parts what WHDLoad does...

[malko]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

[...] Strictly speaking, if a developer wanted to go the extra mile (it would be interesting to know if any did), you can have a floppy with a fully valid filesystem, having an executable program on that you can start from the OS, that would then take over the OS and then load the bootblock-loader(or replicate its functionality) and start from there as if you booted from it - basically what I described as the tool that might exist.
If this sounds familiar to you, then that is in large parts what WHDLoad does...

But you won't use WHDLoad is you have not upgraded your Amiga.
Thus the most common solution that consisted to take over the system and boot directly to have access to the maximum of the computer resources (and maybe also to facilitate the copy protection mechanism in some parts).

[Steam Ranger]

Originally Posted by daxb

Nowadays there is no need for games on floppy disks.

Nowadays there is no need for Amigas. But we keep them around for nostalgia, and floppy disks are mostly used for a similar job, considering a GOTEK is so much better.

[phx]

Originally Posted by daxb

Nowadays there is no need for games on floppy disks. If someone does it than it was/is a conscious decision because of nostalgic reason or such.

Hmm... I wouldn't agree here. IMHO there are more than nostalgic reasons. See below.

Originally Posted by NorthWay

The advantage of the bootblock-loader is to treat the Amiga mostly like a games console: You know exactly how much memory you have and you do not have to give up any of that to the OS.

I would also recommend the bootblock-loader and custom trackloader approach whenever you take over the system and still want to load data from disk at a later point. It is the only clean and mostly safe way.

Only at the time when booting the system out of the boot block, it is in a defined state where all potential extra hardware the user might have installed is reset and doesn't cause any trouble (like interrupt storms).

The advantage of an OS based game is that you get fixes and patches in place before being started, which can boost performance majorly for those with more than a minimal spec.

Yes. Every high performance game that is not targeted at A500/1MB (or maybe even A1200 base version), like a flight simulator or FPS, should use the OS to get access to all resources (caches, extra RAM, graphics cards, network). It will also most likely benefit from a hard disk installation.

If this sounds familiar to you, then that is in large parts what WHDLoad does...

WHDLoad can be nice for old games, but when you write a new game, why don't you fix it, so it doesn't need workarounds like WHDLoad?

Many people use UAE, Gotek, Minimig or other FPGA clones and can conveniently work with ADF files. Although putting a disk into my A3000 or A4000 and quickly booting a game is no problem either. Loading times, especially from newer titles, are neglectable.

For all these reasons I like to make custom trackloader NDOS games as ADF.

[daxb]

You can replace "nowadays" with "since the nineties". Do you want to code a game for Amiga?

[TCD]

[huggy70]

I remember those days when harddisks where some unknown alien artifact and booting into workbench had to be avoided because it was a pain in the b** to boot (and to use IMO) just with floppy drives.

Slap in the disk and go...
Those where the days

[jPV]

Originally Posted by huggy70

I remember those days when harddisks where some unknown alien artifact and booting into workbench had to be avoided because it was a pain in the b** to boot (and to use IMO) just with floppy drives.

Slap in the disk and go...

Yeah, I think the answer to the original question is this simple, there's no need to make up other theories. People just didn't have harddisks back in the day when Amiga was the most popular and when most games were released for it. It was just an A500 with a floppy drive or two, and nothing else for the majority. It would have been waste of time and resources to load WB first and then a game.

Harddisks started to get more popular only after A1200 was released, and then booting from floppies started to be pain in the ***.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

I'm asking this question as it seems that most games boot from floppy disk. Workbench is much more convienient, so it leads me to wonder why they perceive direct booting as a better thing?

Direct booting is more convenient. All you have to do is turn on (or reset) the computer, and insert the disk. If the game is controlled with a joystick you don't even need to touch the mouse - just grab that stick and get ready for some action!

Originally Posted by jPV

People just didn't have harddisks back in the day when Amiga was the most popular and when most games were released for it. It was just an A500 with a floppy drive or two, and nothing else for the majority. It would have been waste of time and resources to load WB first and then a game.

True. A custom trackloader could also be much faster and achieve higher capacity, and make it harder for people to make illegal copies.

Harddisks started to get more popular only after A1200 was released...

However that didn't necessarily make booting from floppy disk redundant. Hard drives had limited storage, so there were only so many games you could put on them. Multi-disk games often had a fairly involved installation procedure, which could fail for a variety of reasons. The user may have had a bunch of stuff loaded that ate into memory and/or was incompatible with the game. Boot from a floppy and none of that was an issue.

If I boot my A1200 off the hard drive with the accelerator card disabled (necessary to run stuff that doesn't like the 030, FastRAM etc.) I only have 600k of free memory out of 2MB.