WHDLoad

FIXME: Move to fs-uae-launcher?

WHDLoad is a sofware solution used to (primarily) allow floppy-based games to be installed to an Amiga hard drive and run from Workbench. Custom WHDLoad "slaves" are written for each game, which patches the game to work on modern HD-based Amigas.

Since WHDLoad is a pure Amiga-side program, it will, like any other Amiga software, run just fine in the emulated Amiga environment provided by FS-UAE. See the official WHLoad documentation for information about how to use WHDLoad in the classical sense.

This document describes how FS-UAE Launcher supports using WHDLoad to make it easy and convient to launch individual WHDLoad-based games. These convenience features are provided by FS-UAE Launcher (and Arcade), not FS-UAE itself.

WHDLoad game archives

A WHDLoad game archive is an archive (.zip or .lha) containing a single WHDLoad-installed game.

Please note that the archives available from whdload.de are installers, not game archives. In order to create a game archive you run to run the WHDLoad installer for a game, and then create a .zip or .lha archive containing the destination directory where you installed the game.

Loading a WHDLoad game archive

In FS-UAE Launcher, if you insert a .zip or .lha file into the primary hard drive slot, the Launcher will check if the archive is a WHDLoad game archive. If it is, it will try to extract WHDLoad arguments from the archive and automatically set some options suitable for running the game (A1200 model, 8 MB fast RAM).

WHDLoad variants in the game database

The online game database contains information about (most) available WHDLoad games. In order for these to appear in FS-UAE Launcher, you need to have the game files on your computer, and indexed by the file scanner in the Launcher.

Note: The individual game files needed for a particular WHDLoad game install do not have to be contained one and the same archive. Also, the name of the archive(s) containing the files do not matter. The Launcher will find each individual required file based on checksums, and create a temporary HD suitable for running the game. Any custom configuration needed for the game will be retrieved from the game database.

Running a WHDLoad game archive directly

You can run fs-uae-launcher with the path to a WHDLoad game archive. The Launcher will then try to automatically create a config suited to run the game, and start it.

2.9.4dev+: If you are using the online game database, FS-UAE Launcher will try to match the archive with a variant from the game database, and use the configuration from the database. If you want to prevent this, you can add the --no-auto-detect-game parameter.

You can disable the progress dialog opened by FS-UAE Launcher by including the --no-gui parameter.

FIXME: Write about launching games using game / variant UUIDs.

Saving games

Related options