Is it possible to corrupt lha archives by unpacking them in Windows?

[dreadnought]

I made a container hdf for my Play It By Year collection recently. There are all the WHDL games on it, ready to run if user mounts it as a secondary HDD to a primary hdf with system & WHDLoad install.


Problem is, while most games work fine, some throw up errors. I'm not sure why, because when I install them manually, they work okay too.



How I made the hdf itself was first described here, and then I mass-copied all my WHDL games to it using WinUAE. Thing is, I prepared the directories in Windows first, by unpacking all the relevant games from the latest WHDL set's lha archives. I'm using Total Commander for that, and it has native lha support.



So I'm not sure why some games won't work after this operation. Is it possible for them to get corrupted by being handled in Windows, and should I do it all in WinUAE instead?

[fryguy]

Unpack them in AmigaOS or you will likely have some issues, maybe mostly with protection bits but probably not only that.

[Daedalus]

Yup, filenames that use certain slightly exotic characters (including space) will cause you problems if they're unpacked on the PC side. Unpack on the Amiga side for the best results.

There could be other issues too - part of the problem with using WHDLoad games prepared by someone else is that it will be configured for their setup, not yours. Some games are more sensitive to the various hardware configurations than others.

[dreadnought]

Ahhh...thanks. I had an inkling it might be the case, but doing it in Windows is just so darn convenient/fast. Even just copying to hdf in WinUAE takes a while.

Can you recommend the fastest WinUAE setup for doing this (we're talking hundreds of archives atm, thousands soon)? I think I was using A4000 default, but not sure this is a safe choice safe as well?

Originally Posted by Daedalus

There could be other issues too - part of the problem with using WHDLoad games prepared by someone else is that it will be configured for their setup, not yours. Some games are more sensitive to the various hardware configurations than others.

Sure, but that's up to the users to deal with.... I can only mention that.

Basically, I just provide the games as-is (which are from the latest Retroplay packs). On the hdf are the same lhas, just unpacked and put in directories for convenience, and also for people who are unfamiliar with Amiga and for whom making hdfs is black magic (had quite a few requests for that).

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Can you recommend the fastest WinUAE setup for doing this (we're talking hundreds of archives atm, thousands soon)? I think I was using A4000 default, but not sure this is a safe choice safe as well

I don't think the emulated architecture matters much as long the JIT is enabled, More compatible is disabled, and CPU speed is set to Fastest possible.

[klx300r]

@ dreadnought


yes so don't do it

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Can you recommend the fastest WinUAE setup for doing this (we're talking hundreds of archives atm, thousands soon)? I think I was using A4000 default, but not sure this is a safe choice safe as well?

As was said, the emulation itself isn't the issue, so using the fastest setup you have will be the fastest way to do it. Note that emulating different models, and even different CPUs, largely doesn't affect the speed of the emulated machine.

The issue stems from using a non-Amiga filesystem and a non-Amiga unarchiving tool. Once it's all kept within an Amiga environment, it'll be fine.

[dreadnought]

I don't know anything about high-end Amigas + add ons, and am not sure how compatible they are across the board. I'd rather ask than run into some problems again.

So, in WinUAE, going into Quickstart and choosing "A4000"+"60840" would be enough? Or is there anything else I could choose to speed it up even more?

[jotd]

Ticking JIT is fast. CPU choice isn't that important.

I tried for years to get a windows solution for lha but it just doesn't work. And archives you're creating with windows lha have permission issues on linux...

that said, because of software that can be burned on CD and all, whdload installs tend to fix Amiga-only filenames when installing. 2 examples come to mind: Batman and Puzznic (spaces at the end of the filenames AFAIR)

So if those constraints are respected (which is 95% of the time) you could use windows lha to extract stuff.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by jotd

that said, because of software that can be burned on CD and all, whdload installs tend to fix Amiga-only filenames when installing. 2 examples come to mind: Batman and Puzznic (spaces at the end of the filenames AFAIR)

The spaces at the end in the Batman file names were caused by a buggy imager. In the fixed version, the file names are saved with their correct names (i.e. without space at the end) but no measures have been taken to make them Windows compatible.

[jotd]

That's not deliberate but just bad luck then

but it still worked on an amiga but not on windows.

The puzznic example is a real one where the filenames are truly incompatible. But there are others.

Murphy's law... "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

Personally if I think that a superior solution (which is automate stuff from windows) works 95% of the time, I manage to handle the 5% other separately or detect the issues beforehand, but I stick to the superior solution, instead of ditching it because of a few corner cases.

Another issue of lha/windows filesystems is the protection bits. Those are rarely a problem, specially with whdload.

[dreadnought]

One lha that acted really weird was Mach 3. That one's causing me problems directly in Windows, when unpacked I sort of couldn't delete it or unpack a new one to that directory.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I don't know anything about high-end Amigas + add ons, and am not sure how compatible they are across the board. I'd rather ask than run into some problems again.

For system-friendly software like this, there's generally no issue with higher end Amigas - it's mostly system-friendly software that really benefits from faster setups.

So, in WinUAE, going into Quickstart and choosing "A4000"+"60840" would be enough? Or is there anything else I could choose to speed it up even more?

Yeah, using JIT will give you a massive boost in speed. Choosing a 68040 doesn't make the emulation any faster than emulating a 68030 - the maximum speed you get depends on the single-core performance of the host CPU, not the emulated CPU. And while you can emulate a 68040 or a 68060, you then have to make sure you have suitable CPU libraries installed and so on. I generally use 68030 emulation for my setups.

[dreadnought]

Alright...thanks for all the tips.

Now I'm stuck on something else. How do I get DiskMaster to unpack archives?

So far I downloaded lha.run, put it in C, and typed "lha.run" in Execute...this I suppose unpacked it (there are a few lha-related files in C now).

But in DiskMaster I still can't unpack anything: when I click on an lha archive, or go to Archives drop menu and use Lha X or Unpack, nothing happens...DM kinda blinks an that's it.

(I know about DOpus, but I'm used to DM and I guess it's not its fault anyway...)

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

So far I downloaded lha.run, put it in C, and typed "lha.run" in Execute...this I suppose unpacked it (there are a few lha-related files in C now).

Rename one of them as lha

[dreadnought]

Nice one, that has sorted it out. Now, to do all the legwork....