Chapter 10

Installing WHDLoad

On the hardfile we moved, C: already had the program.

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.

WHDLoad is why the A1200 stops needing floppies: every game installs onto the hard disk and starts from an icon. The guide unpacks it from a host directory and runs its installer into C:. The A1200 volume that came from WinUAE already had C:WHDLoad, so that installer had nothing left to do.

Automated
1
Download WHDLoad and save it into Programs.
The Windows directory is gone. pack_directory_hdf.sh turns that folder into a slave hardfile, which is what the core mounts. The system partition stays a separate hardfile.
Eliminated
2
Reload WinUAE and start.
Eliminated. Boot the core with the system hardfile as primary master and the WHDLoad hardfile as primary slave.
Eliminated
3–5
Shell, extract WHDLoad_usr.lha from Programs:, endcli.
Eliminated on this disk. The program was already in C:. On a fresh Workbench these three lines are still the shell, aimed at the slave volume.
Eliminated
6–12
Open the WHDLoad drawer, run Install, and accept C: as the destination.
Eliminated for the same reason. A fresh install still clicks through this. The pipe does not.
Once
13
Reset.
Reset in the OSD.
Automated
Kickstarts
The guide stops at the installer.
install_kickstarts.sh copies ROM files you already have into Devs:Kickstarts under the names WHDLoad looks up, and the matching .RTB from skick when you want it. It does not download a ROM. These files are not the image the OSD boots.

Step numbers follow Chapter 10 in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.