Would there be a way of getting in the future Talkie Games to work with WHDLoad

[spannernick]

I was thinking you can use the iso of Simon the Sorcerer in SIMCD32 so you can hear the talkie audio in the game, would there be a way in the future to add maybe iso support to WHDLoad to be able to use the talking audio on CD32 games...?

I know WHDLoad starts games like they are booting from startup so like you have just put in the game Disk in to the drive from the amiga boot screen,(I have WHDLoad version Workbench 1.3 and with Kickstart 1.3) so this might be possible some how, can you make WHDLoad read the startup sequence file then you might be able to get it to mount the iso file and make it see it as a CD Disk, it would need to be ale to read a Mountlist file.

This is just guess work, I have played with WHDLoad loading games with a generic slave to get demos working, like Amos Coin Drop so know it can reads disk1/2/3/4+ images and the game data files from a game disk, you can use RAD with WHDLoad too if you are low on memory in the Amiga too, I used it alot on my A1200 to get some games to work.

[Matt_H]

Why not just copy the contents of the CD to the hard drive? That's what the WHDLoad install for the CD32 version of Beneath a Steel Sky does.

The challenge is that you need heaps of RAM in order to preload all of that fully-voiced game data to prevent intermittent black screens / OS swaps during play. I don't think mounting an ISO file would get you around that technical limitation.

As to Simon CD32 in particular, I don't know why a WHDLoad version doesn't currently exist. The amount of RAM needed is probably the main factor, but I'll defer to an actual coder for a proper technical explanation. Have you tried modifying the generic Workbench 3.1 WHDLoad install to boot Simon CD32 instead?

[spannernick]

Did not think of it preloading the data first...

[Brenry]

I haven't messed with ScummVM in a long time, but briefly searching youtube there is several videos of it running on Amiga 1200. The video has talkie edition running on The Dig. Might look into that option.

[spannernick]

What I was thinking... To get WHDLoad to read iso files without preloading them so it reads it like a CD Rom, maybe add to WHDLoad simcd32 to it so it can read CD iso files, this is just a idea so I do not know how easy that would be.

Then WHDLoad could run Simon and Microcosm from iso files.

[Retro1234]

Why not just use SimCD32 ???
If WHDload didn't preload them it would make no difference to using SimCD32?
and the memory required to preload them would be massive.

[spannernick]

If a device only uses WHDLoad to load games then you will not be able to use SimCD32.

[Galahad/FLT]

Right.

Mounting an ISO can be done, but you would need enough memory to preload the ISO in its entirety, if you cant, it wont work, because the entire ISO has to be present otherwise you could try and load files from within the ISO that are not present because the whole ISO isnt present.

I dont think WHDLoad has the facility to load from ISO's, it would require "hacking" WHDLoad at run time which is not something Wepl would be happy with.

In all cases, the WHDLoad patches would look to rip the ISO to a directory of normally read AmigaDOS files that would be preloaded.

If the talkie bits are actual CD audio, then again, the patches would need to rip these, and patch the in game CD audio functions to play 8bit samples instead.

It's not impossible, but it's a lot of work, and no WHDLoad patcher is being paid for something that will take a very long time, and need extensive testing, when in all likelihood a non whdload solution would work better.

You have to consider that preloading over 200mb of files is going to take some time.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by spannernick

If a device only uses WHDLoad to load games then you will not be able to use SimCD32.

I don't think such a device exists.