Do You Use WHDLoad?

[CodyJarrett]

I'm interested in how many people use WHDLoad here. A few people have said in the past that they don't use it. I think it's one of the best things to happen to the Amiga. It:

1. Runs games/demos completely from hard disk.
2. Removes disk swapping nightmares.
3. Fixes compatibility problems with newer Amigas.
4. Removes any copy protection.
5. Saves the original game from death by floppy corruption.
6. Writes/loads save games/hiscores to hard disk.
7. Sometimes fixes bugs.
8. Apart from the initial registration, the installers are provided free.
9. Often fix incompatibility problems with Amiga emulators, by eliminating problems with disk loading problems, badly coded pirate intros and anti-copy protections.
10. Supports over 850 games and over 170 demos.
11. A quitkey can be used to exit from all games to Workbench.

So, the question I want to ask is, do you use it and if not, why?

[RetroMan]

No, I prefer adf´s Why ?? well, I tried WHDLoad 3 times and none worked really well, maybe I´ve just been unlucky....

I prefer working with adf2fms and since my A1200 got 40MB Ram, I don´t have any problem loading LOADS of adf´s into the Ram-Disk anyway

[CodyJarrett]

Retroman: I'd be interested in knowing what your problems with WHDLoad were and whether you were using cracks or originals.

Nope. I don't use it

Reasons
======

1) My Amiga died
2) I don't play games anymore
3) I liked JST more

Not to say I don't like WHDLoad. I think it's a brilliant package, but I was never too enthusiastic about it

But....If (when?) I get better at reversing on the Amiga, I might turn to WHDLoad for some slave writing, as I've been told it does basically everything for you

[CodyJarrett]

Amigaboy: you can use WHDLoad with emulators too!

I know, but I don't even use emulators that much

The only times I emulate is when someone needs help with a game, or I wanted to test a game

Since I don't play games anymore, WHDLoad (and JST too) are pretty much useless to me

[ptrchiappe]

No, i don't use it because i don't have that much time anymore to play games (you know wife, daughter, shopping and so on ).

Besides i didn't really had the need to install some particular game, because adventure games (Lucasfilm and others) all install to HD without particular problems while other games are usually on 1 or 2 disks and i could live without installing.

But if somebody at WHDLoad org writes a slave for Prison (hint - hint - hint) then i will surely change my mind on it .

[Magix]

Yes - but I haven't registered

WHDLoad and Jst are great installers ( in my opinion ) for Real Amigas and emulators too.
I prefer Jst because it's free. I don't like WHDLoad's "wait" screen
Maybe I'll register later

I'm happy. Long live WHDLoad, long live Jst...

[CodyJarrett]

Magix - sorry to tell you this, but JST is dead! Jean-Francois Fabre is now writing WHDLoad installers.

[Magix]

I know. But this is can't change Jst's position on my favourites list

Don't worry I like WHDLoad too
And I'll continue to use it.

[Paul]

I use WHDLoad as it saves me having to swap disks all the time and has faster loading times. If only I had a bigger HD on my Amiga 600 and had the room for it as well as my PC, I would use whdload on the real machine.

If I had the room I would buy a 1200 or 4000...........no I would have a computer room built where I would have a 2GHZ PC, A power mac, Amiga 600, A1200, A4000, etc........I can dream can't I

Reading the above you can see I don't get out much

[Amiga1992]

No, Other reason.

The reason? My A600HD only has a small 30MB HD, from which 6MB are taken up by the OS, and teh other 24 have lots of my stuff which I should backup, but I dont want to get rid of my gfx/music programs.

When I get a bigegr HD I will register My problem used to be memory but now with 2MB I suppose it would be enough for most games.

If I need more memory, add anotehr reason

Yes, I use it all the time and I and my are bro registered users..

You forgot one great feature of WHDLoad CodyJarret, the Quit function!! I really love this function... You can quit every loaded game with a simple press on the quitkey (mostly F10 but you can configure it for yourself...) so you don't have to reset your Amiga when you are finished playing a game..(not that a reset takes much time but I just hate resetting my Amiga... )

WHDLoad simply rocks if you have a real Amiga with a big HD.. I don't think it is very useful for the people who are only using an Emulator...

And WHDLoad even rocks more because Galahad made a WHDLoad patch for Kick Off 2, my favourite game!

[CodyJarrett]

Yeah, you're right - I forgot the quitkey!

[RetroMan]

Originally posted by CodyJarrett
Retroman: I'd be interested in knowing what your problems with WHDLoad were and whether you were using cracks or originals.

There were a couple of problems, most of them telling me that WHDload could not find file this and that, I must admit that I was too lazy to search for the reason why I used Originals of course, no joke, I knew that WHDload only works with originals

After all, all games I want to play, mostly have a HD Installer coming with them, and the others, ahhh well, leave them on adf, also I got more that 1300 Amiga disks in boxes here, I prefer plugging them into my old A500+ and play

[Codetapper]

WHDLoad is simply the greatest Amiga util ever invented and I use it everyday! Not purely for playing games, but it has a tonne of cool features which I use to crack other games which don't specifically have a HD installer for them...

If anyone here has had bad luck running WHDLoad games, I suggest that you just got a bad install (by luck). The majority of them are very well written and have nice install procedures which multitask while imaging "non copyable" disks!

There are a number of complete games on the Action site already compressed, just unpack them and run. If the only thing you dislike is the splash screen, then register. If the games themselves work perfectly then you can test out how great the games are!

PS: Check out some multidisk ones especially and forget that function key in WinUAE forever!

[CodyJarrett]

Listen to this dude, guys!

I used JST for install games, but its difficult to find original games (R Type works, its wonderful )...
But WHDLoad is good also !!

[CodyJarrett]

For those 3 people who don't know what WHDLoad is, here's an explanation.

Most Amiga games comes on floppy disks. This was fine in the old days of the Amiga, as games tended to be small. Hard disks were not common. Long loading times and disk swapping were problems, however.

Eventually, hard disks started to become more common and many games (mostly flight sims, RPGs and strategy games) had their own installer which meant that you could run the game from hard disk - all the files would be copied into a directory. Other games without an installer could be run by using the assign command too.

But, there were a large number of games which couldn't be installed to hard disk. The disks would be in a non-DOS format, for copy protection reasons and so that the programmers could take over the whole machine. This often meant that the games wouldn't work on newer Amigas.

After having bought a shiny new hard disk, this wasn't good news.

The first attempt to solve these issues were to create individual installers for each game. However, it was likely that each installer would share similar code.

Jean-Francois Fabre and Bert Jahn created two separate systems to fix these problems. Jean-Francois created JST and Bert created WHDLoad. They encapsulate common functions that can be used to install games.

With WHDLoad, a slave needs to be written for each game. The data on the game floppy is read into a disk image on the hard disk once and the slave redirects floppy access to this file afterwards. WHDLoad has all the advantages listed in the first posting of this thread.

Essentially, you can run hundreds of Amiga games off the hard disk with a double-click and never have to worry about disk swapping, long loading times and incompatibility with your A1200 again.

WHDLoad is about $20 to register. Not registering means that a nag screen appears each time it is run. JST used to need registering, but it is now freeware and discontinued.

See:

WHDLoad - www.whdload.org
JST - http://jffabre.free.fr/amiga/patches.html

I have a problem with WHDLoad:

I want to use it on an Amiga 600 with 2 megs of RAM but a lot of games need a lot of memory for 'preload option' (for example, Brian the Lion needs 1.0 Chip + 2.7 other mem), so my question is if there is and option that disables preloading of the disks.

Thanks in advance