Amiga (PUAE) and non-bootable HDF images

Libretro Cores
#1

I’m very new to Amiga systems, and I’ve been building a playlist of games for this system but there are quite a few games that cannot be found in the traditional ADF/IPF/LHA images, so all I can find is HDF images ready to run with FS-UAE standalone emulator. When I load the HDF image in libretro’s P-UAE it boots to the Amiga OS and there I can run it from an icon.

I want to be able to boot the game directly, but I have no clue how that would work. I’ve been reading about .uae config files but nothing I’ve tried works in that sense. FS-UAE makes it seem fairly trivial, it has a startup script that mounds the floppy and the HD and runs perfectly. P-UAE doesn’t seem to support that kind of startup, instead all I read tells me that I need a specially-crafted-bootable HDF which I obviously don’t have a clue how to put together.

It’s not just one game, a lot of the bigger games, which include FMVs, speech, etc., those usually cannot be found in LHA format anywhere, but they exist in HDF format in a few places, but it’s unfortunate that I can’t really use them properly.

Anyone familiar with the Amiga and P-UAE core in this regard?

#2

Edit the startup script which is or should be located in S:Startup-Sequence on every boot drive to launch whatever you want directly.

Total Commander for example has a handy plugin which is able to read and write ADFs and HDFs, if editing inside emulation is a problem. Just make sure you don’t enter Windows style newlines to the script.

S: is the short assign of SYS:S, SYS being the boot drive and S the directory in the root. No idea what kind of shenanigans FS-UAE is doing, but that is the Amiga OS way of doing things, and just like real hardware, there is no way to autodetect what the user wants to start, if you don’t count special WHDLoad standards.

Whoever is creating single game HDFs that does not do that should be spanked…

1 Like
#3

Before posting I had already installed Total Commander (+AmigaDX plugin) and been reading on Startup-sequence, but I wasn’t too sure if or how it would work, but your reply gave me the motivation needed, thanks for that!

It still took a couple hours of trial and error to make it work, mainly because initially the game would start without video image if I skipped loading Amiga Workbench (LoadWB), but eventually I reduced it to what appears to be the bare minimum to run the game properly.

In case it may be helpful to someone else in the future: I replaced the Startup-sequence in the root S directory (inside the HDF image, using Total Commander), with the following:

SetPatch QUIET
ASSIGN Libs: SYS:Libs
ASSIGN WD: SYS:WastedDreams
WD:Wasted i
EndCLI

A couple notes:

  • Without assigning root Libs the game would start without image;
  • The game executable Wasted is run with the i argument just so it plays the intro, like when running it normally from the app Drawer.
  • The whole Startup-sequence file structure is Linux-like, which means that new lines are formatted with LF (Line Feed) instead of the typical Windows structure CR+LF (Carriage Return + Line Feed), if you use Notepad++ you should be good.
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