My Amiga Installation Process

[hansolo77]

Ok, this isn't meant to bash Headkaze in anyway. This is meant to be a tool help everybody. First and foremost, let me acknowledge HK as being one of the most helpful people in this community. Without him and his many tools and services he's provided, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Now, lets start at the VERY BEGINNING...

Monday. I decide it's time to added some new systems to my gaming extravaganza. I've never owned a Commodore Amiga, nor have I ever owned anything from Commodore. So this is going in clean slate newbie here. I check out my old pals at my favorite emulator ROM torrent website. (I won't provide anybody with links, so before you ask.. don't bother). I find a nice torrent:

"[RS] The complete set of amiga games, TOSEC 0.29 [all games/1980]"

Included in this torrent is:

Commodore Amiga - Games - ADF (TOSEC-v0.29).7z - 3.35 GB

demos.rar - 427.85 MB

Kickstart Images (TOSEC-v0.03).rar - 20.38 MB

Workbench Disks (TOSEC-v0.03).rar - 2.01 MB

After a couple days worth of downloading, we are now at today.. Wednesday. My setup is like this. I have 2 computers. One is my primary work computer and the other is my Media Center/Gaming machine. The torrent downloaded on my primary machine and is sitting happily waiting for me. The gaming machine I have remote access to via pcAnywhere (knock it if you want, it works, and thats all I care about). So, the first thing I do is open up the gaming machine and launch GameEx's wizard setup.

Next, we chose advanced, because we've already setup the system previously.

Then you hit next a couple times until you get to the Download Emulators screen.

Note that I have circled some things. The way my machine is setup, all my Media Center/OS things are located on 1 drive, and all my music and movies and games are on another. So, I have to change the default emulator's path to match my desired location. I also need to scroll down the list until I find the Amiga Emulator I will be using.

Now we've selected the WinUAE program and started the download action. When completed, it automatically extracts the zip file to the folder we specified. Just to make sure, lets double check this was done.

Ok great, everything looks good so far. Lets move on. Back in the setup wizard, click [Next >] at the bottom of the screen. Click this a few more times until we get to the Setup Emulators? screen. Since we just downloaded a new emulator, we have to configure it for GameEx.

So we say Yes, and click Next.

Find an empty space on the left menu (your emulator list) and highlight it. Then on the right side, highlight the Amiga (WinUAE) config. Then click on the large LEFT arrow button in the middle of the screen to "install" that config into your GameEx setup. Then click [Next >] to go on to the next screen.

HEADS UP HEADKAZE!! This is where I hit my first snag. The paths didn't carry over from the install. This is because the saved configs for this Emulator were made using the default save path. Since my setup is slightly different, we need to adjust these to match. Headkaze might be able to fix this in a newer version of the wizard when it's released. After making the changes, just click [Next >] and make sure everything else is setup correctly. All is good, so we Exit the setup wizard. Now we have to configure WinUAE to work right. This is where I'm stuck. Since this guide/process is provided from a newbies point of view... we should be able to do this together. I go into the install folder and launch the program.

This is the first message I get. Obviously, it must do this test to continue, so say [Yes].

I then get this message. It is telling me that it has detected no ROMs. This usually happens in fresh installs of emulator's when you haven't setup the paths to your BIOS's yet. So click [OK].

Now I get another message. This one looks like the last one, stating it can't find any BIOS roms. Click [OK]. We're gonna have to fix that.

Finally we get to the main screen. Before we go any further, it's time to move our files over from the main computer to the gaming machine.

I did a little exploring of my torrent and found that the file named "Kickstart Images (TOSEC-v0.03).rar" has some files in it that say BIOS. They also have a lot of the files that the program was asking for when we first launched it. So I unrared this file and moved it into the root path of the emulator. I didn't bother to rename the folder, so I might have to go back and do that later. I also copied over the file "Commodore Amiga - Games - ADF (TOSEC-v0.29).7z". I'm suddenly very concerned. The filesize of this file alone is over 3gb, and the extracted filesize is reported (on the torrent site) to be 27gb. I only have 8.19gb remaining. CURSED BE ME WITH MY LACK OF JOB!! WHAHAAHAH!! Anyway. After copying over those files/folders, I went up to the line marked PATHS and pointed the line "System ROMs:" to the location of the Kickstart folder.

To make sure the software detected this, I clicked the button [Rescan ROMs]. It popped up a confirmation window that all is well now.

So from here, you click [OK]....

This is all the farther I have gotten. I have an idea what to do next, but can't try it until I have more drive space. My theory is this. Extract the file "Commodore Amiga - Games - ADF (TOSEC-v0.29).7z" into a folder like "ROMS" or "GAMES". The Greatness that is Headkaze has written a program which does something with these files. I believe it creates individual configurations, of which GameEx then launches. The software is here and instructions to use it are here. From what I understand, the program inserts your WinUAE configuration into a sort of mini-launcher that then links the config with your ROMs (games). You tell it your config you want to use, the path where the roms are (in this case, our new folder with the extracted 7z file), and a configuration output path (which I believe is the WinUAE/Configurations folder, since that's what GameEx is looking for when building your ROM list). But, like I said, I can't continue with the testing of this theory right now. However, I will once I have room, and I will post my findings thereafter. If anybody wishes to reply to this, please do, and tell me if I'm headed in the right direction in the process.

[lingpanda]

Isn't that file a 7zip goodmerge file? No need to unzip that file. Gameex has support for these file types.

[headkaze]

First of all I just wanted to say that WinUAE is by far the hardest emulator to set up on a cab, so it's understandable that your having a problem.

HEADS UP HEADKAZE!! This is where I hit my first snag. The paths didn't carry over from the install.

The Setup Wizard has not been designed to be so intelligent. Considering one may place an emulator in any folder it would be arrogant of me to assume the place they download is the place I should modify the config folder to point to. It only has a default location, so if you download using the default location, the paths are already setup, otherwise you have to change them yourself. It's the reason there is a default path, if you use the default it's easier to setup. The Setup Wizard can be run at any time, so you can imagine how annoying it would be if the Wizard changed your config settings every time you ran it to some path that's wrong. It's just too hard to predict things like that.

The WinUAE Config Creator is not very intuitive I know. First of all it's only recent versions of WinUAE that have support for 7Zip. So I don't think the Config Creator even searches for 7Zip files I think it searches for the adf files, so you need to extract them.

The problem is that WinUAE needs a config file to run a game from command line. So you have to create a config file for EVERY game. So the way you do it is you setup your controls etc. for a game and use that config with the WinUAE Config Creator to generate the configs for every ROM. GameEx launches WinUAE with the config as the parameter NOT the ROM.

Finally, I have not setup WinUAE on my cab since my recent reinstall of GameEx. So I am going to re-write the WinUAE Config Creator so that it works with 7Zip and a few other things I want to include like the ability to setup your controls from it. I think it's really confusing setting up the controls for WinUAE.

If someone wants to help me they can find out where WinUAE stores the joystick info in the config. For example, if you have an IPAC and set up the default keys to be mapped to the Amiga joystick input where does it save this info? I would like to be able to have it so this info can be entered into the Config Creator so you don't have to rummage through and setup your key input through WinUAE (which from memory is a nightmare).

[hansolo77]

Well, at least it looks like I was on the right path. I don't think this torrent I have is "goodmerged". The 7z is only 1 file, and its a 3gb file. Goodmerge is usually multiple 7z's with each one containing multiple revisions and versions of the ROM. But all-in-all, I think I'm going to hold off on getting the Amiga up and running for right now. I've got tons more to do still that I'm excited on getting setup. They're not in your wizard, so I'll be keeping you updated on that. For example, there are a LOT of M.E.S.S supported systems, and goodtools has merged them out nicely. Thing like MTX's, Intellivision, Coleco, Entex, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to see what I can do about the WonderSwan. I've already got a working emulator, but it doesn't seem to support any command-line. Oh well. Thanks for the heads up on this.

[night]

As Headkaze states the Amiga is one of the most tricky thing to do becouse some games/demoes dosent work with one Kickstart (3.1 / 2.0 / 1.0-1.3) or dosent work with 68020-68060 cpu then there is the AGA (GFX) chipset some games uses other dont and last adding fast ram helps some game for speed more sound others simply dosent work ..

Amiga are for the ones there either have owned the system and know which games are for which period and uses what or simply take the time to try the differents combos

its a great system and many great classics but i think the best thing are to just take your own little collection of your favorite sets and set that up manuely

[kipper2k]

Hi,

I have my Amiga config files and snap pretty well all set up...I have about 2900 config files that i set up so that people can easily use them in their own systems without having to change the config files at all. I have about 100 more to setup and the Amiga is all finished. Once i get it done i can post it (its about 7 meg).

Here is a peek of a sample game.

floppy0=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk1.ipf

floppy0type=0

floppy0sound=1

floppy1=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk2.ipf

floppy1type=0

floppy1sound=1

floppy2=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk3.ipf

floppy2type=0

floppy2sound=1

floppy3=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk4.ipf

floppy3type=0

floppy3sound=1

diskimage0=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk1.ipf

diskimage1=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk2.ipf

diskimage2=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk3.ipf

diskimage3=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk4.ipf

diskimage4=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk5.ipf

diskimage5=X:\Dragon's Lair II - Time Warp\DragonsLairIITimeWarp_Disk6.ipf

nr_floppies=4

Using an old DOS command SUBST, i created a batch file which starts on bootup, which will assign volume letters to the directories where the actual configs, snaps, rom images, and the games itself so that regardless where you place your games you can always point it to the new drive letters. Obviously the names of the directories will need to agree. I created directory names that show the name of the game itself.. theres nothing worse than the old 8 letter directories that i have seen... UGH!!.

If any one needs help etc, let me know

Kipper.

PS. something was mentioned about the uncompressed torrent being huge. You do not have to unzip the adf images and can specify a zipped adf PROVIDING THAT... the game file itself can remain write protected. Some games need to be write enabled and therefore cannot be in a zip file as winuae will not write to a zipped file.. The Games Directory will only be about 3.2 Gig for all the games