Which games are better played from IPF/ADF than Whdload?

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by StingRay

...This is not caused by WHDLoad at all, try the original disk based game on AGA machines and be surprised what the score display looks like.

just about Swiv, that score glitch was fixed in a previous slave but it is happening again in the latest ones

or it is working by pure luck using that previous slave i dunno

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by rsn8887

Another thing that bothers me a lot is the flickering of WHDLoad slaves where the whole screen flickers black during loading. It can ruin the experience of cool loading screens and intros.

This flicker happens if you don't use Preload option, or if you don't have enough RAM to preload the game fully.

Originally Posted by rsn8887

In a stream, we also came across a lot of bugs with saving in Neuromancer WHDLoad (saving and re-loading games corrupted the game). We switched to the floppy version which worked fine.

WHDLoad by default tries to cache disk writes until it exits back to AmigaOS, so the saves are lost if you reset or power off instead of using quitkey. This can be changed by NoWriteCache option.

Everyone new to WHDLoad loses their their saves at first, so it would nice if the WriteCache behaviour were explained in every slave readme.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Octopus66

If you have an 060 then yes I totally get it. Even an 040.

That's the other thing and WHDload has nothing to do with it: the Amiga platform is super fragmented regarding hardware expansions and it's not just "which processor are you running", there's a ton of accelerators and they all work in their very different ways, with different processor types that perform differently, timings between CPU and RAM chips and many other details that can create issues in WHDLoad.

Nobody at all can be expected to be able to cater for what happens with every specific configuration. The sole remaining WHDLoad installer people (as far as I know it's just StingRay and JOTD caring about working on those still) cannot be expected to fix or even know every problem. They probably only have one, let's be crazy and say 3, different hardware configs hey can directly test with. The rest of the feedback comes from Mantis bug reporting, which almost no one does, and being that they don't have direct access to particular hardware, fixes can take a while.

So yea "I have no problems with it on my setup" means nothing much to anyone else.

Originally Posted by rsn8887

If you look at the WHDLoad slave situation, many slaves have just been fixed in 2022, 2023, 2024. This means there were many bugs left unfixed for decades. This shows the statistical likelihood of the many bugs left in the slaves which haven’t been updated in more than two decades. Often the source code of slaves is not open source either, making fixes very hard.

Yes this is true and I don't think people ever go to mantis to see the state of it, there's bug reports from decades ago never tended to, it's just too much work for the two people that care. Unrealistic to fulfil.

So yeah back to the topic, I think there's many chances where a good old fixed cracked release on floppy (images) performs better than WHDload slaves that have been buggy and rotting for 20 years. I don't believe anyone who tells me "I have no problems at all with WHDLoad", perhaps they don't play games for more than a minute.

[Octopus66]

Originally Posted by Amiga1992

That's the other thing and WHDload has nothing to do with it: the Amiga platform is super fragmented regarding hardware expansions and it's not just "which processor are you running", there's a ton of accelerators and they all work in their very different ways, with different processor types that perform differently, timings between CPU and RAM chips and many other details that can create issues in WHDLoad.

Nobody at all can be expected to be able to cater for what happens with every specific configuration. The sole remaining WHDLoad installer people (as far as I know it's just StingRay and JOTD caring about working on those still) cannot be expected to fix or even know every problem. They probably only have one, let's be crazy and say 3, different hardware configs hey can directly test with. The rest of the feedback comes from Mantis bug reporting, which almost no one does, and being that they don't have direct access to particular hardware, fixes can take a while.

So yea "I have no problems with it on my setup" means nothing much to anyone else.

I mean to say where you have 040 or 060 I imagine WHDLoad is your only option to run some games and it serves a crucial purpose. See SWOS slowdown issue for example.

[Octopus66]

Originally Posted by rsn8887

Then there are inconveniences such as in Leander WHDLoad. If you forget to enable buttonwait manually, you will not be able to read the password after each world, because the text vanishes so fast. This is an unfortunate choice of defaults for the slave. On the floppy version, the password can be read easily and the game always waits for a button press. On WHDLoad, if you forget to enable buttonwait for this game (and how would you know if nobody tells you?), you will have a great frustration when you finally finish world 1 and cannot read the password. Also, without buttonwait, you won’t be able to read the mission description at the beginning of each world.

If you are unfamiliar with a game it is definitely safest to play with IPF images.

[Bren McGuire]

i don't think people here are saying WHDLoad serves no purpose mate they are saying there are indeed some cases where playing from a floppy (image) yields better results, ymmv

Originally Posted by Octopus66

I mean to say where you have 040 or 060 I imagine WHDLoad is your only option to run some games and it serves a crucial purpose. See SWOS slowdown issue for example.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by rsn8887

If you look at the WHDLoad slave situation, many slaves have just been fixed in 2022, 2023, 2024. This means there were many bugs left unfixed for decades.

I challenge you to find a slave "fixed" in 2022->2024 that works from the original IPF on the same spec Amiga. I am just curious if you can find one.

Originally Posted by rsn8887

This shows the statistical likelihood of the many bugs left in the slaves which haven’t been updated in more than two decades.

Remove "slaves" replace "original game" then this sentence might be more accurate?

Originally Posted by rsn8887

Often the source code of slaves is not open source either, making fixes very hard.

The developers who don't release their source (Psygore?) are still active. Raise a bug on Mantis. If they don't look at it raise it on EAB in WHDload section and maybe someone else will look at it. And I'm curious to know if the bug is in the Slave or in the original game but hasn't been patched yet.

Originally Posted by rsn8887

In a stream, we also came across a lot of bugs with saving in Neuromancer WHDLoad (saving and re-loading games corrupted the game). We switched to the floppy version which worked fine.

User error?

[rsn8887]

Originally Posted by alexh

I challenge you to find a slave "fixed" in 2022->2024 that works from the original IPF on the same spec Amiga. I am just curious if you can find one.

One example is Virocop AGA. I couldn’t enter passwords with letter P in them on WHDLoad but it worked fine via floppy. It was fixed in 2023 after I reported the bug.

The Neuromancer save game corruption bug was not due to user error like not quitting WHDLoad properly. It was a genuine corruption that happens after playing for a while and doing multiple saves and loads, even within a single session. I reported it but never tested again after I got so frustrated with vanishing inventory items and other corruption. http://www.mantis.whdload.de/view.php?id=5056

Recently, I played through Flashback starting with the WHDLoad version. But the blinking lights in the energy or key cutscenes looked wrong and sure enough, the floppy version looked correct. So I decided to finish the game using floppy images because of that.

Here’s a reported crash happening later in Brian The Lion AGA after finishing Spooky Ruins, reported by someone else already: http://www.mantis.whdload.de/view.php?id=5801

These are the kind of bugs I encounter with WHDLoad slaves. They are usually things one notices only after playing for a while. It is not enough to play only for 5 minutes, then switch to the next game, like most people seem to do when they proclaim they “never had any problems with WHDLoad.” If you start seriously playing games, trying to complete them, problems with the various game installs often become more obvious.

Maybe it is just my bad luck but there’s about a 1/4 ratio when I try to actually play through a game or seriously play a game for a long time on WHDLoad that I seem to run into some kind of bug. This frustration caused me to switch back to floppy images as my default for most sessions.

On Mantis there are currently approximately 2200 open issues, and most bugs will not get reported because they are either not found yet or people encounter them and just switch to floppy instead without reporting the bug.

I am not dismissing the WHDLoad project. I think it is great! But it is good to have floppy images as well, to be able to switch to floppy in case one encounters some issue when trying to complete a game or play a game for a long time.