Is there a site like "CSDb.dk" for Amiga?

[+wongojack]

I've gotten spoiled . . .

[Daedalus2097]

I'm not familiar with CSDb, but a quick look reminds me of https://ada.untergrund.net/ in Amiga terms, which is an archive of demos and details on the scene from the Amiga's life, right up to the present.

 

http://www.pouet.net/ is another site that's more focused on the current demo scene, parties and so on, also worth checking out.

[+wongojack]

 

2 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

I'm not familiar with CSDb, but a quick look reminds me of https://ada.untergrund.net/ in Amiga terms, which is an archive of demos and details on the scene from the Amiga's life, right up to the present.

 

http://www.pouet.net/ is another site that's more focused on the current demo scene, parties and so on, also worth checking out.

 

Thanks!  Those two sites definitely fit the description of "scene" sites for the Amiga.  

 

However, if you aren't familiar with CSDb.dk then you definitely should be.  Along with demos, all the C64 crackers and hackers seem to post their latest versions up there.  It makes it easy to see if someone has recently created an EasyFlash or single disk version of XYZ game/program.  I have a library of Amiga games from the last decade, and I just wanted to look and see if any easier to use or hacked versions of the games I already have exist.  That is SUPER easy to do on CSDb.

 

***Unrelated to the title - are there pre-installed hard disk versions of games that float around "out there?"  Please don't link them, but I'm just ignorant about how WHDLoad and the Amiga HD works.  It seems that I actually have to go through the steps of installing the game from disk to a virtual HD if I want to use it in Win UAE.  Is there some sort of way to just grab a pre-installed version and attach it and go?  I mean, I can do this type of thing in modern PC virtualization now, I figured it must exist for the Amiga but maybe I am wrong.

[Daedalus2097]

Yep, pouet.net tends to be updated with any new versions of things, and reworked / fixed demos will turn up usually on both.

 

The whole point of WHDLoad was/is to be able to install copy-protected games to the hard drive, which is why it's mostly geared towards real hardware and original disks. WHDLoad on WinUAE has the drawback that it can't install from real disks, which means you either need to find images of the original disks. ADF images commonly found are most often of cracked versions, not originals, since the ADF format doesn't support the non-standard geometries used by many copy protection schemes. The images of original disks are typically in IPF format, which are more difficult (but not impossible) to find. The modified nature of the cracked versions means the WHDLoad installers don't often work with cracked images.

 

That all said, you can find pre-installed games from a few places. First, if you look around on auction sites, you'll find plenty of options for buying compact flash cards preinstalled with thousands of games. These will be chock full of WHDLoad-installed games and are usually pretty cheap. The intention of them is to connect to the IDE port of an A600 or A1200, but if you have a card reader, you can either mount the card directly in WinUAE as a hard drive, or take an image with any disk imager software and use that image as a virtual hard drive in WinUAE. That'll be you set up and ready to play.

 

The second source is to look for pre-installed archives of WHDLoad games. The key thing here is that they're frequently distributed as .lha archive files, so searching with that term should turn up plenty of results. Download, unpack to your Amiga's hard drive and you're sorted. It's important to remember to unpack in the Amiga environment, and not on the Windows side, because unpacking with WinRAR or similar will lose some of the unique file properties supported by Amiga filesystems and that can prevent programs from working.

 

In both cases, it's also worth bearing in mind that WHDLoad is very flexible and can be adjusted to suit virtually any hardware setup. The downside of this is that when you get a game that someone else has installed on their machine (both the options above come from this method), it will be configured for their hardware and might not work well on other configurations. The most common hardware setup is probably something like an A1200 with OS 3.1, an 030 CPU, 2MB chip RAM and 16 or 32MB of RAM, so start with that and it should match what most of the original installers were using.

[+wongojack]

1 hour ago, Daedalus2097 said:

Yep, pouet.net tends to be updated with any new versions of things, and reworked / fixed demos will turn up usually on both.

 

The whole point of WHDLoad was/is to be able to install copy-protected games to the hard drive, which is why it's mostly geared towards real hardware and original disks. WHDLoad on WinUAE has the drawback that it can't install from real disks, which means you either need to find images of the original disks. ADF images commonly found are most often of cracked versions, not originals, since the ADF format doesn't support the non-standard geometries used by many copy protection schemes. The images of original disks are typically in IPF format, which are more difficult (but not impossible) to find. The modified nature of the cracked versions means the WHDLoad installers don't often work with cracked images.

 

That all said, you can find pre-installed games from a few places. First, if you look around on auction sites, you'll find plenty of options for buying compact flash cards preinstalled with thousands of games. These will be chock full of WHDLoad-installed games and are usually pretty cheap. The intention of them is to connect to the IDE port of an A600 or A1200, but if you have a card reader, you can either mount the card directly in WinUAE as a hard drive, or take an image with any disk imager software and use that image as a virtual hard drive in WinUAE. That'll be you set up and ready to play.

 

The second source is to look for pre-installed archives of WHDLoad games. The key thing here is that they're frequently distributed as .lha archive files, so searching with that term should turn up plenty of results. Download, unpack to your Amiga's hard drive and you're sorted. It's important to remember to unpack in the Amiga environment, and not on the Windows side, because unpacking with WinRAR or similar will lose some of the unique file properties supported by Amiga filesystems and that can prevent programs from working.

 

In both cases, it's also worth bearing in mind that WHDLoad is very flexible and can be adjusted to suit virtually any hardware setup. The downside of this is that when you get a game that someone else has installed on their machine (both the options above come from this method), it will be configured for their hardware and might not work well on other configurations. The most common hardware setup is probably something like an A1200 with OS 3.1, an 030 CPU, 2MB chip RAM and 16 or 32MB of RAM, so start with that and it should match what most of the original installers were using.

Thanks again for the reply!

 

I take it that if you must unpack .lha packages within the Amiga environment, that means you still must start the workbench and likely install that first within an A1200 environment?  I guess I was looking for something with even LESS overhead than that.

 

From your help and what I am reading (and I've seen some of the detailed steps), the basics are

1) Configure an A1200 environment with 4 HD

2) Attach the LHA into DF1 or higher

3) Start workbench 3.1 (preferably by installing it)

4) Run the LHA installer by clicking it or whatever

 

I guess step 4 could be different if the files are already installed?

 

[Daedalus2097]

An lha is an archive like a Zip file, not a disk image like an ADF. Also, I think you're confusing the hard drives and floppy drives. On the Amiga, the floppy drives are labelled DF0: for the standard drive, and DF1:, DF2: and DF3: for the additional drives. Hard drives are typically labelled DH0: for the first partition, DH1: for the second and so on, though those labels can and do change depending on circumstances.

 

A basic installation of Workbench on a virtual hard drive is more or less a given if you were intending to use the system for anything other than running games from floppy images, so setting up the virtual hard drive with the Workbench 3.1 installer disks is the very start, and necessary for using WHDLoad. You don't need 4 hard drives, though traditionally Amiga users tended to have multiple partitions (e.g. Workbench: for the OS, Work: for programs, Games: for games). I would advise setting up a shared hard drive directory that is accessible from both the Amiga and Windows, which will make it simple for transferring files downloaded in Windows to the Amiga. Lha is a command line program, so you need to run it from the Shell. You can download the lha.run package from Aminet, run it in the Shell and it will unpack itself as a couple of different files including executables for a couple of different CPUs. Copy the one you want into the SYS:C directory of your boot drive and rename it as lha. Then, when you have an lha file you want to extract, navigate to its location in the Shell, then use lha to unpack it:

 

lha e archiveName.lha

For this purpose, I like to put the archive in the RAM disk, unpack it there and then copy the contents to wherever they should be on the hard drive. The WHDLoad package itself would be one of these archives, and then if you find pre-installed games, they would be more. Once WHDLoad is unpacked, it will have an installer script that you double-click to take you through the process, and games that are unpacked simply need to be dragged to wherever you keep your games on the virtual hard drive.

 

To be honest though, I'm sure there are hard drive images you can download that will have all this already done and include 95% of all games ever released for the Amiga, and this would be the way to go for simplicity. I doubt very much these guys selling fully loaded CF cards online for £20 have set up the OS, utilities and installed thousands of games themselves - they just found a 4GB, 8GB or whatever image, downloaded it and stuck it on a card. It's not really my thing (I prefer to have a small collection of games, most of which I actually own), but such images are occasionally talked about in Amiga Facebook groups and the likes.

 

 

[+wongojack]

Thanks for all the info!  I was aware of the difference between DF and DH, just going fast.

 

I guess I was hoping to split the difference between paying someone to do this and taking some shortcuts.  I've looked in my usual places, but haven't found any pre-configured disks for download with a bunch of games like that, and I'm not interested in paying.  I do have disk images downloaded for pretty much every Amiga game.  I'll probably just stick to mounting disks and using warp to speed through load times for now.

 

As for the topic of the thread - I'll keep poking around at the links you gave, but it seems there is nothing quite like csdb.

[Gryfon]

On 1/24/2021 at 4:16 AM, wongojack said:

Thanks for all the info!  I was aware of the difference between DF and DH, just going fast.

 

I guess I was hoping to split the difference between paying someone to do this and taking some shortcuts.  I've looked in my usual places, but haven't found any pre-configured disks for download with a bunch of games like that, and I'm not interested in paying.  I do have disk images downloaded for pretty much every Amiga game.  I'll probably just stick to mounting disks and using warp to speed through load times for now.

 

As for the topic of the thread - I'll keep poking around at the links you gave, but it seems there is nothing quite like csdb.

If you need a hand I'll be happy to help.  I've got real Amigas, lots of experience with emulating Amigas on Windows, Mac & especially on Raspberry Pi.

Which Amiga do you have?

[youxia]

I made a WHDLoad  image for my real Amiga some time ago, it's not that difficult (and I'm a noob). Just make a HDD, install WB on it in Winuae and copy all the games there. When you do it once, then you just start games from WB (via Winuae)

 

There are two even easier alternatives:

-find a hdf collection: these are single-game HDD images you just fire up in WinUAE like adfs, super easy.

-look for MegaAGS. It's a one big image made for MiSTer, but can be launched from WinUAE. Got a frontend and most of Amiga games on it.

[+wongojack]

I finally got back to this and configured WHDLoad in Win UAE.  Here are some instructions I wrote for beginners over on eab.abime.net:  https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1564902&postcount=28

 

In the spirit of the title of this old thread "WHDLoad for Beginners Guide?" Let me try to summarize the steps and info that I think are critical in 2022. I've also got more questions that I will add at the end or in follow up.

The very basics are that you should understand that WHDLoad was designed to work on a real Amiga. That means that instructions you get will work for an emulator but have been intentionally designed for use on real hardware. This means that tutorials and walkthroughs may often skip over steps that seem completely obvious to a real Amiga user.

The first thing that confused me was when guides and tutorials used the word "Install." I've been using emulators of all kinds for years, and I've never gone through a software installation except for maybe something like a game in DOS Box. In the case of WHDLoad, "Install" refers to 2 things. The first is that you need to configure an Amiga OS environment with a Work Bench and a few other utilities. One of these utilities is WHDLoad. The other thing that "Install" refers to can be actually installing a patched version of a game in that Work Bench enabled environment.

To install your OS or environment you need the software from the 80s and 90s. You can get this many places like this guide: http://guide.abime.net/wb3.1/intro.htm

Really you are after 4 different programs or applications

1. Workbench 3.1 <- basically an Amiga OS with a gui like Windows
2. lha.run <- this is and archiver like WinZip or Winrar
3. Installer <- if the archives you unzip have the necessary files then this creates a nice "install" icon for you to double click
4. WHDLoad <- let's you play a game that has been patched and installed

I got

• Workbench from Internet Archive (search "Amiga Workbench 3.1 Installation Files")
• lha.run from http://guide.abime.net/wb3.1/intro.htm
• Installer from http://guide.abime.net/wb3.1/intro.htm
• WHDLoad from http://www.whdload.de/

Note that when using "Installer" to patch the first game, I got a pop up telling me there was a newer version. I spent 10 minutes researching that and just stuck with the old version. if you do NOT plan to patch your own games and intend to use pre-installed packages then you really only need Installer to install WHDLoad and the version above seemed to work fine.

---
So beginner, now that you have your software the 2 sentence explanation of what you are going to do in an emulator is this. You are going to create a virtual hard disk in Win UAE and unzip and install required software on it. When complete, you will start the Amiga which will boot to a gui interface where you will be able to add and launch games/programs.
---

A - Follow the instructions in the WorkBench 3.1 guide for details on how to set up Win UAE. They are outdated, so might confuse some people new to emulation. I think the critical parts are

• You must configure an Amiga 1200 with Kickstart 3.1 rev 40.68
• You will configure a "Hardfile" which will be the virtual hard disk where the OS is installed
• You will configure (at least) 2 directories/folders that will act like additional hard disks to handle unzipping and game storage

B - Continue to follow the instructions to install Work Bench 3.1 which is all graphical and fairly familiar in 2022. Next you start typing shell commands (like a cmd "shell" in Windows) to install "lha," "Installer," and "WHDLoad." Examples of the commands you will use copied from that guide are:

• Programs:lha.run Ram:
• Copy Ram:lha_68020 C:lha
• lha x programs:Installer-43_3.lha programs:
• Copy programs:Installer43_3/Installer 😄
• lha x programs:WHDLoad_usr.lha programs:

C - When done with that you can play games by either

• Patching game disks/images using a WHDLoad file found here: http://www.whdload.de/download.html
• Unzip (with lha NOT WinZip) a pre-installed game archive and launch it

I think after setup/install most people will use some version of this command to unzip pre-installed games.

lha x <HDfolder>:<archivename>.lha <destination>:

When complete, navigate to the location you specify as <destination> to find either the patch installer or the unzipped game. Note that you may have to resize the window or do a Right Click to hover over the menu at the top and choose "Update" for the files to appear.