All this time none of my machines have had WHDLoad on them. There are several reasons for this but the most obvious being most of my machines are period-correct artifacts running OS 1.3.
When I wanted to try and install and load a floppy-based game off a hard drive, oftentimes simply copying the disk over and making some assigns would do the trick. Or, the disks themselves would have hard drive installers. Frankly there simply hasn't been a need.
As a last resort there is also always JST, which is a shell-based OS 1.3 version of what WHDLoad eventually became. And I've used that program thanks to the brilliance of folks like Crispy, who converted the NTSC version of Pinball Dreams to launch with JST off our hard drives back in January of 2021. That was super cool.
There are only a few games in my large collection that were disk-only. And honestly it never really bothered me enough to go install what my friend would call an extra layer “shim” to get games on my machines. I just never really saw the point.
Now, obviously a lot of folks like to convert their Amigas into cornucopia-filled game consoles with hundreds if not thousands of games at the ready. For me, those setups often cause analysis paralysis. I actually like to stay focused on a game one at a time. I think if I had thousands of games loaded on my computer, at the first serious challenge I’d be far too inclined to simply close the game and fire up a different one.
Honestly during the pandemic I’ve had that lack of focus ADHD problem already. I would tell myself that adding WHDLoad to the mix would have only made my attention problems worse.
However, I’ve always wanted one game to play well on my Amigas: Dungeon Master 2.
I played that fantastic game all the way to the very end on an accelerated Amiga 2000 with 2mb chip the first time around. The problem is whenever there are multiple enemies on the screen at the same time (e.g. the Axe Men), the frame rates come to a screeching halt. I was still able to get through that game all the way to the final boss. But you have to run around on a cloud while dodging droids and fireballs while also attacking. And in my case, I had to try and do this at 1-3 frames per second. It was impossible.
That failure scarred me, and I could never let it go.
I later played the game on my Macintosh Quadra 700 at 40Mhz, and even then I wound up transferring my files from that machine over to my 500Mhz Powerbook to beat the final boss. Which I did (it was great!).
Meanwhile, I’ve since installed the game to my Amiga 3000 @16Mhz and knew right off the bat it wasn’t worth the effort. No way in hell.
Fast-forward to when I put the zz9000 in the machine. I was testing that machine with various applications and quickly learned RTG cards often break a lot of software programs. At the time, I thought, “I guess this will have to just be a dedicated machine with very little gaming on it.”
Some would load fine, others would lock up.
Dungeon Master 2 would load, but within 1-2 minutes in the first underground cave where you select your characters from their steampunk cryo-chambers (yep), the game would lock up. Every single time.
But then I somehow snagged a CyberStorm MK2 @50Mhz accelerator this year and finally, I thought, this might give my Amiga enough juice.
It’s easy to determine because after picking your characters, you go upstairs to find a few objects then head outside. Once you leave the building there is a very strong rain. This rain is actually pretty hard on Amiga hardware to produce smoothly. I can get through it, but when I have to battle creatures out in the animated rain it’s noticeably slower. On the Powerbook I can glide right through everything - it’s absolutely fantastic. The downside is the Amiga's NPC character and monster graphics are so much better. The Mac is based off of the PC art, which is cartoony and not as cool. The Amiga - visually - is the way to go.
But, the game still crashed.
So! I finally decided to sit down and install WHDLoad on this particular Amiga 3000. My long-shot hope was the folks at WHDLoad made this program play nice with late-90s Amiga advancements. I didn’t go the 4GB ridiculous all-in-one console route. I merely installed the base program, a needed archive extractor (xadmaster.library) and the Dungeon Master 2 installer.
That installer actually uses my original disks then “patches” them to try and be more compatible - in theory. It's actually a very nice approach.
Note: The original game shipped in a box stating on the side:
“Requires Amiga 1200, 2000, 2500, 3000, 4000.
Workbench 1.2
3meg total memory
Hard disk required
Mouse supported.”
What a fascinating list! No 500? No 600? Probably due to an assumed lack of chip RAM. And lets talk about the goofy usage of those commas, hm?
Inside the box there is a paper insert stating the game requires an Amiga 1200. This is because this game supports AGA 256 color mode - very cool indeed! But not something I was caring about, obviously. Plus, I already knew the game worked on my other machines, just slowly.
My hope was WHDLoad would magically just make things work. I installed the correct kickstart (the 1200’s) and launched the program.
The folks at WHDLoad made the game work ONLY on A1200/4000 AGA hardware! They stripped the game's ability to play on all hardware as originally designed!
It was actually worse than before as now I couldn’t even open the program.
For what it is worth, years ago I used to own an A1200 and installed DM2 on it, too. It was a stock 020 @ 16Mhz with 8MB of RAM and a hard drive. Skullkeep didn’t look any different at first blush (I didn’t do detailed side-by-side comparisons) but it did feel as fast as my 2000 in the dungeons. I ran out into the thicket and ran the ultimate test: The Axemen during rain.
Same damned thing: sluggish as hell!
So WHDLoad locked the game down to only work on machines that would still have to be accelerated to even play without frame-rate issues. Arg!!
After spending time this weekend getting WHDLoad installed only to run into this (and with no warnings in the README file that they’d changed the requirements to AGA-only) I was utterly and totally defeated.
Out of all the games I wanted to try, there was only one other I could think of at the time to try. Thankfully, that one works.
It looks better on my other CRT-based machines, but it’s nice to have it working. And, it moved over my scores from my disk! That was a nice bonus. I should re-install it later today with the disk I used that has the one instance where I beat the game. I used the original EPYX disk with WHDLoad.
I do like how this shim creates this little hard drive buffer by using original disks. Kind of cool, and a lot easier for me to wrap my head around than
……..
My next experiment is to try and create a software switch to disable P96 and use the Amiga’s video built-in video modes to try and run my original (non-WHDLoad) installation with the CyberStorm. I’d love to see how the game plays on that card without locking up.
When I’m in the cave, before things crash, I can tell the movements are pretty smooth and silky. If I could just get outside to the rain...