Chapter 11

Installing a game

The HD-Games directory is a hardfile. The original disk, when the installer asks, is a floppy slot.

Why any of this

The Amiga 1200 was the last great Amiga Commodore made, and the desktop people built on it is the one worth having back: Kickstart 3.1, AGA, a hard disk, a graphics card for a screen bigger than the chipset could draw, MUI for modern windows, color icons, and WHDLoad so every game lives on the disk instead of in a box of floppies. An emulator or a MiSTer puts that machine back on your desk. Getting to that finished desktop is the work.

You cannot download it ready-made. Workbench and Kickstart still belong to someone, so the disks and the ROM have to be yours, and Commodore’s own installer has to copy them. Everything after that is a recipe of Proceed buttons, the Green Amiga Alien guide, which people have followed by hand for twenty years. These notes turn that recipe into scripts, so someone new to Amiga emulation gets the upgraded A1200 in an afternoon, from disks they own.

The end of the road is a build nobody babysits. AmiPilot can sit inside the running Amiga, click what is left of the installers, and take a picture of the screen, so an AI agent can check that the desktop came up, that the icons are in color, that a game launches, and fix the script when they are not. Every page here is one step toward that.

This is the payoff: a game installed onto the hard disk and started from Workbench. The guide adds a third host directory for installed games, then walks one installer that stops and asks for the original floppy. The directory is the part the core cannot do. The floppy request is real.

Automated
a–g
Create an HD-Games folder, add it as a directory drive, and resave the WinUAE configuration.
The folder and the Add Directory button are gone. pack_directory_hdf.sh turns that folder into a slave hardfile, which is what the core mounts. Save the OSD with that hardfile as primary slave.
Automated
1
Download a WHDLoad install and save it into Programs.
The install archive belongs on the slave hardfile, next to the other archives. Use originals you own. An imaged disk that is already in the drawer does not need this step.
Eliminated
2
Reload WinUAE and start.
Eliminated. Boot the core.
By hand
3–6
Extract the install and open its Install icon.
Still the shell and still a double click. A drawer that already contains the slave and a disk image has no installer left to run.
By hand
7–12
Intermediate User, the readme, the games volume, and the icon style.
Still the Installer. When it asks for an icon, choose NewIcon. RomIcon is a 16-color dither that NewIcons will not repaint; if a game already has one, fix_romicons.sh merges the installer’s .newicon into it.
Once
13–15
F12, put the original ADF in DF0, return, and Proceed if the copy waits.
On the core that is the DF0 slot in the OSD. In WinUAE the same request is floppy0 on the named pipe. Proceed stays by hand.
Automated
17
F12 and eject.
AKS_EFLOPPY0 1 on the pipe. Clear the floppy slot on the core.
By hand
18–20
Open the games volume and start the icon the installer created.
Still a double click. Quit keys belong to that slave.

Step numbers follow Chapter 11 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.