Hard drive games¶
Hard drive installed games are the easiest to deal with. First of all, they load much faster than floppy games and you don’t need to swap disks. Secondly, most of these games can save your progress to the hard drive, so you don’t need to deal with save disks.
Most of the big multi-disk adventure games and RPGs, especially the ones developed by American studios, are hard drive installable. Then a good number of games that don’t have official hard drive installers can be still run cleanly from a hard drive by employing a few simple tricks. It’s important to note that none of these tricks involve modifying the game’s executable or data files—such hacks are not allowed in RML Amiga.
Hard drive basics¶
The first hard drive is called DH0: (Drive Hard 0), the second DH1:, and so on. These are analogous to the C: and D: drives on Windows. Most hard drive games in the collection use a two hard drive configuration:
-
DH0: contains a heavily stripped-down AmigaOS—just the bare minimum necessary for running games. This drive has the System label.
-
DH1: contains the game itself and usually has the label Game, but this can vary (e.g., ChampionsOfKrynn, PopulousII HD, LEGEND.0, etc.). This drive is mapped to the
Harddiskfolder inside the game folder, which is just a regular folder; you have full access to its contents from Windows. This is handy if you want to back up your save games or to transfer your characters in RPG series.
A small number of games that need very specific AmigaOS setups only use a single DH0: drive which contains both the OS and the game.
Workbench¶
Most hard drive games start automatically when you launch their configs, but some need to be started manually from the so-called Workbench screen.
One of the reasons why some games don’t start automatically is because they have additional icons to start the game with different options (e.g., King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown (SCI)), or to run extra programs included with the game, such as level editors (e.g., SimCity Collection).
The other reason is that a handful of games feature beautifully designed icons and Workbench screens with custom colour schemes. These works of art are worth preserving, and to date, RML Amiga is the only game collection that attempts to do so.
Here are some good custom Workbench examples:
Saving your progress¶
Most hard drive games store the save games on the hard drive; using the in-game save and restore functionality is usually straightforward in such games (but in some, the save game menu is a bit hidden; make sure to consult the game’s manual if you can’t find it). If a game asks you to select the location of your save file and lets you use any location, you should use the DH1: drive unless the Game notes instruct you otherwise.
There are some outliers, though. A handful of games insist on saving to a floppy disk even when installed on the hard drive (e.g., Future Wars). Then some RPGs save the “state of the world” to the data files as you keep progressing through the game, so starting a new game with a new character requires a full reinstall (Amberstar and Demon’s Winter are such games).
The Game notes contain detailed instructions for these special snowflakes—make it a habit to always check these notes before playing a new game.
Patience is a virtue
Never ever reset the emulated Amiga or quit WinUAE immediately after saving your game to the hard drive! Always wait 2-3 seconds and make sure the hard drive activity LED indicator in the OSD in the bottom-right corner isn’t flashing red anymore (red means write activity; green means read activity). If you don’t wait, there is a good chance you will lose or corrupt your save game!
The reason for this is that hard drive writes happen in a slightly delayed manner on the Amiga—it’s just a quirk of the platform you will need to get used to.
Key disks¶
One of the major selling points of the collection is preferring uncracked originals. Some hard drive installable games need a so-called “key disk” (usually the first game disk) to be present in drive DF0: (the first floppy drive). This is a form of copy protection; the key disk contains some special areas that cannot be copied by standard Amiga floppy drives. The game checks the key disk at startup and perhaps even at later points during the game, and if it’s not present or an illegitimate copy is detected, Bad Things™ will happen. This can range from polite error messages to outright crashes, black screens, and hard reboots.
Such games have the key disk already pre-inserted in DF0: so you don’t need to do anything. This is just worth calling out as some people might be confused by the floppy activity when starting key disk protected hard drive games.
WHDLoad games¶
A handful of games in the collection use something called WHDLoad. This is a tool people invented in the mid-1990s to play disk-only games from the hard drive on their later Amiga models (such as the Amiga 1200). The tool was also used to apply compatibility fixes to finicky games that only ran correctly on a stock (or close-to-stock) Amiga 500.
This means WHDLoad conversions are not originals but cracked and patched games (disk-based protections had to be bypassed and the game’s disk access code had to be rewritten so it could run from a hard drive).
RML Amiga uses WHDLoad games only as a last resort because removing the copy protection and altering the games’ code can introduce all sorts of problems, including making the game incompletable. Issues introduced by these hacks are really hard to test in long 50+ hour RPGs; consequently, WHDLoad conversions of long and complex games are plagued with the most problems because they simply don’t get enough testing from the hobbyists doing these conversions (WHDLoad versions of relative short action games are usually much better quality).
Back in the day, WHDLoad was a necessity to allow people to enjoy their game collections on their new Amigas. It was a means to an end and an ingenious one at that–but not without complications. In an emulator context where we can emulate virtually every Amiga model imaginable, much of WHDLoad’s positive aspects lose their relevance but the negatives remain. For games that are natively hard drive installable (70% of the games in this collection), using WHDLoad is especially pointless and generally results in an inferior experience.
Always quit WHDLoad games to save your progress to disk!
Due to various technical complications, WHDLoad games only write the save games to the hard drive when you quit the game—the saves are kept in memory until then.
Therefore, you must always quit WHDLoad games by pressing the F11 “WHDLoad quit key” at the end of your gaming session! If you just close WinUAE or start a different game, you will lose all the saves you made in your current gaming session! All WHDLoad games in the collection print out a warning message about this at startup, and the Game notes also contain some reminders.