WHDLoad and its application...

[MethodGit]

No new patches for more than a week. This worries me somewhat. OK, what's happened?

[CodyJarrett]

I think all new patches go through Wepl before they are placed on the website, so if he is not there they pile up and are released at once when he returns.

[RetroMan]

Why bother with WHDLoad ??? I used it once and it was horrible getting my Original to work

I always mount my adf´s as a Virtual Disk in RAM: !! That´s even faster than using a HD-Installed game and the game is as playable as from HD ..........

but that´s only my very own opinion

RetroMan

I personally thought (and still do) that JST was a better package than WHDLoad, but, it seems that the JST days are over, so I have to switch to WHDLoad

[CodyJarrett]

What are you guys saying? WHDLoad is great!

On the WHD vs JST argument, WHDLoad wins with no contest. On numerous JST games I had to set tooltypes such as NOMMU, NOFAST or NOCACHES to get the game to work. WHD hardly ever needs this. Also, it's still in development. JST was great in its day but WHD surpassed it sometime ago.

The advantages of WHD are:

1. Games load quickly from hard disk, obviously.
2. All games have a quit option to return to Workbench.
3. The games are fixed to work on modern machines.
4. No more bothering with ADFs or floppies or disk swapping.
5. You are running the original game, not a pirate version.
6. The games are patched to pass any copy protection.
7. Hiscores or save games can be sent to the hard disk.
8. Bugs or annoying features are fixed.
9. Over 800 games are currently supported with installs.

With people like Codetapper releasing very high quality installs, there has never been a better time to use WHDLoad. It's extremely cheap to register, it works beautifully and I can't imagine running games on my real A1200 using anything else.

I never said WHDLoad wasn't good. Hey, I love it. But I've always preferred JST. Most of the JST installs were made to work perfectly on a 2mb chip machine (I have an 18mb machine now, but that's not the point) which I used to use frequently a while back.

With WHDLoad installs, the requirements usually require at least some fast ram

@RetroMan: I would really appreciate if you or somebody else could tell me a little more about this mounting-adfs-as-virtual-disk-thingy. So far I just heard about fmsmount or virtualfloppy from Aminet, but I really have no clue how do deal with them, how it works and especially how compatible it is.
Also I assume you can only run DOS games with that.

Thanks in advance

[Riempie]

I have a virtual floppy drive on my HD. It's called FF0. I use this very much because I can unpack adf-images / dms-images etc to it. When installing a 5 disk game for example I unpack these disks to FF0. I run the install script within FF0 and when it asks for disk 2, I unpack this disk again to FF0 etc.. This way I don't need to unpack dms-images or adf-images to a real floppy disk and install from the disks. Off course it only works with dos-games unless you're trying to install a WHDload game. When a WHDload game uses a non-dos disk, I change the install script and change all lines where it says DF0 into FF0. This way the script (using DIC or RawDIC) will make an image of the virtual non-dos disk in FF0. Very cool.

I can't remember exactly how I installed this FMS tool. It's been a few years. I know which files I need, but I would have to check that at home. I should try to make a second virtual floppy disk....
The file you need is defenitely called fmsdisk.lha or fms_20.lha

[Riempie]

6. INSTALLATION OF FMS (FMS_20.lha)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. Copy the correct device for your processor to the DEVS: directory
68000 and 68010 users:
C:Copy fmsdisk68000.device devs:fmsdisk.device

68020+ users:
C:Copy fmsdisk68020.device devs:fmsdisk.device

Make sure the device file is called fmsdisk.device

2. Assign FMS: to a directory on your hard disk where you want the 900k virtual floppy file to be.

3. Append the Mountlist included onto the end of your current DEVS:MountList using your favorite text-editor (The text for the mountlist can be found in the archive).

4. Mount the device using C:Mount FF0:
Put this line in your user-startup if you want to have access to FF0 all the time.

5. The first time you use the device, you'll need to initialise it, this is done by simply formatting it. You only need to format it the first time to create the file.

SYS:System/Format drive FF0: name Empty NoIcons FFS

Now you'll have a formatted virtual amiga floppy.

Thanks a lot.
This sounds very promising, as it really gets boring to adf2disk all 12 disks of MonkeyIsland2, only to install it afterwards ;-)

When a WHDload game uses a non-dos disk, I change the install script and change all lines where it says DF0 into FF0.

Would it be possible to do an "Assign DF0: FF0:" instead (Maybe unassign DF0 first with "Assign DF0:") ?

Thanks

[Riempie]

Assign DF0: FF0: ? Would be a lot easier I must have tried it as it sounds very simple and the first thing to think of. I guess it doesn't work, otherwise I would be using the assign every time.

I do know that you can't unassign DF0, because you then get the message: can't cancel DF0

I do know that you can't unassign DF0, because you then get the message: can't cancel DF0

Thanks, so I guess you are right and the Assign won't work.
I'm mostly using preinstalled WHDload/JST games, so I won't miss it that much.
But I'm really looking forward to install Dune II from virtual floppies ;-)

CU

Originally posted by Riempie
I do know that you can't unassign DF0, because you then get the message: can't cancel DF0

Of course you can unassign DF0: . I do it all the time. It's something that very few people know how to do (Damn me for reading the F**king manual)

assign DF0: DISMOUNT

That'll get rid of DF0: . Now assign it where you feel is right

[RetroMan]

@Riempie

good description.... if you set it up that way (well allmost) you can use a utillity called ADF2FMS from aminet to mount 6 Virtual Floppys at once (FF0, FF1, FF2 ......) so you never had to change disks again (okok, except for Monkey Island and a few others )

I´ll post my MOUNTLIST and a CLI Script I wrote for that in the ADF Zone tomorrow if somebody is interested

gimme a comment ....... RetroMan

P.S : You can even mount HF0: (a virtual HardDrive) for example a WinUAE Hardfile with it

[andreas]

@Amigaboy

Exactly. Future Wars is even able to save to HD using this procedure (I unmounted RAM:), BUT ... it does NOT work with older Kickstarts like 1.3!

assign RAM: dismount
assign RAM: DH0:

If I remember correctly, the 'Dismount' option came with OS 2.0 (if at all and not 3.0).

Originally posted by andreas
@Amigaboy

Exactly. Future Wars is even able to save to HD using this procedure (I unmounted RAM, BUT ... it does NOT work with older Kickstarts like 1.3!

assign RAM: dismount
assign RAM: DH0:

If I remember correctly, the 'Dismount' option came with OS 2.0 (if at all and not 3.0).

hehe. Why use kickstart 1.3 + HD for anyway?

[Riempie]

Then I guess I never tried to dismount DF0....
And yes, I use ADF2FMS too for adf-files. But I only use one virtual floppy drive which is fine by me..

HDF-files with FMS? Interesting (but would be a bit useless...)

Thanks for all this further information, as this topic really interests me.
Let me see if got right:

-One uses adf2fms to create fms Files from ADFs
What is the exact difference between those two formats ? (I suppose I could do some reading, but listening to you guys is a lot easier ... )

- Then one uses fms_20.lha or fmsdisk.lha or virtualfloppy.lha or what to mount the file ? What's best ?
And what about the VirtualHD-thingy Retroman ? Can one also mount HDF-files ? And how do you do it ? Which prog ?

-Then the famous RetroMan-script (which takes advantage of one or more of the tools named above) can be used to simplify the process, by creating multiple disks at once.

@RetroMan : I'm looking forward to your script, as it will be a good source to learn from.

@Amigaboy : this DISMOUNT-thingy is a good one, I didn't find that in any reference that I've been looking at. I'm ancious to see if that works. Does one even need the DISMOUNT-option if one boots from harddisk ? I'm not sure if DF0: gets mounted (MOUNTED not assigned) that way.

Thanks

P.S.: Don't worry about using this thread for such offtopic-purposes... the topic sucked in the first place

[Codetapper]

OK lads, a few of you are doing crazy things here, like taking an adf, writing to ff0: then changing whdload install scripts from df0: to ff0: etc... Pure madness - here's why!

1. If the WHDLoad script is a clean one as provided in the developer archives, select ADVANCED as the user option and you will be able to choose ff0: instead of just dfx: for all games which use DIC (the majority of games I would guess).

2. If a game uses disk images and you have an ADF, it is 99% of the time safe to just cancel the script at that point where it wants to image the disk and rename your ADF to Disk.1, Disk.2 etc. Forget transferring to ff0: or df0: etc. The only time this might fail is if the script copies something after the imaging which is NOT recommended anyway. (The other side effect is you have an adf which is 901120 bytes and the game might optimise it a little by slicing off the end if it's just padded with garbage).

Hope that helps!

[Amiga1992]

Oi you lot! You are forgetting a simpler way of making DF0: disappear. If you've got an A600 or A1200, keep those two mouse buttons pressed on bootup, and disable the bastard! I always had to do this to save on memory when I needed everything I could get while running HD apps and I only had 1 meg of RAM.

I didn't like FMS because I couldn't run NDOS games from it. For installing means its great, but for nothing else. Not for me with my dinky little 30MB HD anyway!

I AM interested, though, in mounting hfx: files as FMS disks... mind to share the knowledge, retroman?