Workbench boot vs Direct boot

[jPV]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

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.

Yeah, if you plan to use a setup without an accelerator (and its memory), then you'll have to be careful how you have set up your partitions. Making too many partitions with big blocksizes or buffer amounts will consume memory, and a compromise should be thought. Or disable unneeded partitions when doing that, or at least lower the buffer (if not from HDToolbox, but with the AddBuffers command before starting to do anything else). There isn't that big memory loss if you use low buffers in that kind of situations.

I somehow stopped booting games from floppies when I got my A1200 in 1993/4, and very rarely disabled my B1230 when I got that couple years later. I don't know if it was that I had enough HD space for the time (the very first HD was already 120MB and upgraded soon to 500MB or so). The HD was so marvellous to use that using floppies just felt wrong And HD patched games started to appear for games that didn't support HD installation etc..

[Bren McGuire]

in most cases you will save a little RAM bonus points if your program boots straight without opening an AmigaDOS window which will eat up a few more KB

[Bren McGuire]

also different filesystems take up different amounts of RAM with FFS being probably the most RAM efficient so great for humble setups i know i tried lol

Originally Posted by jPV

Yeah, if you plan to use a setup without an accelerator (and its memory), then you'll have to be careful how you have set up your partitions. Making too many partitions with big blocksizes or buffer amounts will consume memory, and a compromise should be thought.

[Photon]

A1: The Workbench consumes an amount of memory according to the user's preferences, which you don't know as writer of the program. The user may expect to run music in the background or require prior access to mouse buttons, and asking to take precedence might be denied, so that the program will report an error and not run. (The user may also expect to run many other applications concurrently, but this has no effect other than to run all programs including the new one at the performance afforded by the performance of your Amiga setup, i.e. how it should be.)

A2: You can also boot to HDD or FDD without startup-sequence directly to a CLI prompt. This will only remove the buffers you set for an HDD if they are not present or disabled. From there, (i.e. potentially before accelerator memory has been added), you can patch any accelerator present for compatibility to run an AmigaOS program. This should also add the memory perhaps required by your software, but if not carefully set up by the user for this purpose, much non-accelerator memory may have been consume including chipmem.

A3: If your platform requirements are modest, you might want to support all machines that can run under those requirements. E.g. if your requirements is only 512K chip + 512K other mem or better, or 2MB chip 68020, or 2MB chip, 68020, and 4MB other mem, and your release fits or is made to fit on one or two floppy disks, it's a good choice to not require to boot to WB. (If an HDD or multiple floppy drives are present, the buffers assigned to them can still be relevant unless you kill the OS.)

A4: Amiga has a large kernel, and has not been afflicted by the driver- or library-versionitis of other platforms. Programs are based on fundamental libraries in ROM (and so available on any boot media), or if booting from HDD assumes that you have set up your Amiga (i.e. have installed drivers and libraries accompanying your expansions). As such, there is no installation procedure like on other platforms. There is sometimes an install script to ensure resources are copied to standard folders, but if you already have them, you can just run the executable.

A5: Bootable floppies are made to work on a certain platform and up, and is tested to perform on such platforms and up (regardless of booting to the floppy or trackloaded). The programs thereon may include code to set up your hardware as detected, i.e. use an FPU if detected otherwise fallback, or set up the CPU rather than have you copy a CPU drivers to the floppy and insert it into the startup-sequence.

A6: Even if a program is not larger than say, 2 compressed diskettes, it may be desired by a user to put it on an HDD once and for all and have it available from a few clicks. For this, WHDLoad is available and so the "all-inclusive floppy images" is still looked on as a good release option. Keeping it on floppy allows those who don't have an Amiga, or just started setting up an Amiga, or don't have a modern HDD solution set up yet, to run the program.

A0: The simple answer is that Amiga has not yet matured to the point of other platforms, which will find any and all excuses to not run a program, which is the sole responsibility of an OS - in a sensible world. Thus, it can run any program from floppy, or multiple floppies and thus, it's either prepared for doing so by loading directly and takes into consideration your HW setup, or simply put the files there for you to copy to HDD, perhaps with a handy script.

All this is not to say that the Workbench makes it hard, it makes it easy. But these are some reasons for packaging as .adf over an archive of loose files over source files for compiling over install files that require incessant updates of this, that, AND the other thing.

[Steam Ranger]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Direct booting is more convenient.

Only if you have a lower-end Amiga. I have an Amiga 2000 with 9MB of memory and a 512MB hard disk card. It's much more convienient for me to boot from workbench and my hard disk as it means:

1. I don't have to restart the computer when done with my game, I can just close it
2. I don't need to write games to floppy before using them

[phx]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

Only if you have a lower-end Amiga. I have an Amiga 2000 with 9MB of memory and a 512MB hard disk card. It's much more convienient for me to boot from workbench and my hard disk

You didn't mention the CPU, but with 9MB I doubt that there is much more than a 68020. Then this is lower-end as well. I bet that most games start up quicker from disk than you can even boot into Workbench.

And booting from disk is also safer. I wouldn't trust any game to not corrupt some of your system structures, when returning to WB. Even if WHDLoad tries to fix most of it. But you never know.

I do always reboot my Amigas, even when running an originally HD-installable game.

[daxb]

You don't need Workbench to start a game/demo/program. Starting from WB only means you are already on WB. It doesn't make sense to start WB first to only launch a game from there (floppy disk or hard disk). There are several options to start something from HD without loading something else before.

[Photon]

Any ejectable media has the same pros as CDs, cartridges, and disks: you pick it up, pop it in and power on.

Installing even a small game or utility on PC or in WB would take longer to start, even if you just hammer space to get through the install steps blindly. Ejectable media allows you to try, and some allow you to install if you like.

Now if you spam a CF card full of stuff *beforehand* (in some time that is not counted somehow) you can just click a few times to start them, but that's different. You've installed a bunch of stuff you don't know that you want to try, you didn't pick it until you clicked it. But the same can be said for a USB stick full of ADFs, and is quicker, so.

Anyway, already answered, normal user stuff, have a good one.

[Steam Ranger]

Originally Posted by phx

You didn't mention the CPU, but with 9MB I doubt that there is much more than a 68020. Then this is lower-end as well. I bet that most games start up quicker from disk than you can even boot into Workbench.

And booting from disk is also safer. I wouldn't trust any game to not corrupt some of your system structures, when returning to WB. Even if WHDLoad tries to fix most of it. But you never know.

I do always reboot my Amigas, even when running an originally HD-installable game.

Stock 68000 CPU, the RAM isn't an accelerator it's a RAM card.

[Steam Ranger]

Originally Posted by Photon

Any ejectable media has the same pros as CDs, cartridges, and disks: you pick it up, pop it in and power on.

Installing even a small game or utility on PC or in WB would take longer to start, even if you just hammer space to get through the install steps blindly. Ejectable media allows you to try, and some allow you to install if you like.

Now if you spam a CF card full of stuff *beforehand* (in some time that is not counted somehow) you can just click a few times to start them, but that's different. You've installed a bunch of stuff you don't know that you want to try, you didn't pick it until you clicked it. But the same can be said for a USB stick full of ADFs, and is quicker, so.

Anyway, already answered, normal user stuff, have a good one.

I know the Amiga is older, but the question is why PCs, even since the 80s but completely today, install games on HD while most Amiga games are meant to be run from removable media.

[Mafi]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

I know the Amiga is older, but the question is why PCs, even since the 80s but completely today, install games on HD while most Amiga games are meant to be run from removable media.

Because PCs mostly had HDDs? I’ve played PC games (XT) that booted from floppy because there just wasn’t a HDD. Besides DOS wasn’t multitasking, the Amiga was. If you want a game and don’t care about the OS, then just boot directly from floppy.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

I know the Amiga is older, but the question is why PCs, even since the 80s but completely today, install games on HD while most Amiga games are meant to be run from removable media.

Because games load much faster from HD. So if a HD is present you'd use it. Quite a few bigger Amiga games actually have native HD installs btw.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

I know the Amiga is older, but the question is why PCs, even since the 80s but completely today, install games on HD while most Amiga games are meant to be run from removable media.

I tried running Wolfenstein 3D (shareware) of a 1.44MB floppy disk on a 486/DX2-66. the load times were not good, seeing the red line under the "Get Psyched" slowly go up.

HD for the win, I only tried it once.

[Steam Ranger]

I don't particularly understand why most Amigas didn't have hard disks. After all, at the price point of all the big box Amigas they cost more than many PC clones. And at $700 the Amiga 500 still wasn't "cheap".

[Thomas Richter]

Look at the prices. The first harddisk I got for my A2000 had 80MB capacity, and it costed ~1400DM back then.

[drHirudo]

On the Amiga, the main reasons of booting directly into the game/application own trackloader was the futile fight against piracy and/or faster boot time (on demoscene productions, games, etc..).

Because the Amiga had standard 880K floppies and nothing else, custom trackloaders, fighting piracy were on almost any new game release. Compared to the PC and Atari ST, which had many different floppy formats (3½-inch, 5¼-inch, HDDs, most of their releases were file based, thus requiring booting into the OS first.

[Rotareneg]

Custom disk formats could squeeze in an extra 100 kB or so, which could easily make the difference between a game shipping on one or two floppies, or having nicer music samples, etc.