Amiga (PUAE) and running AmigaCD ISOs?

Libretro Cores
#1

I have a couple games in CUE/ISO format and the intended platform is AmigaCD, which to my understanding is an Amiga 1200 with a CD drive, entirely different from the Amiga CD32, I might be wrong about some or all of this though.

My issue is that none of games in CUE/ISOs load. For one, the core assumes CD32 medium and loads the CD32 BIOS, which is probably incorrect for these two games, but even if I force another BIOS ROM it still won’t boot. The two games I tested are:

  • onEscapee (1997)(Sadeness)
  • Wasted Dreams (1999)(Digital Dreams)[!]

Do these games need to be installed, or converted to another format (HDF, LHA, etc.) , or something else, in order to run at all?

@sonninnos Sorry to ping you with this, it’s just that you might have a simple answer to the issue that I’m describing. Thank you for your time.

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#2

You aren’t indeed supposed to run them in CD32, but A1200 or higher from Workbench.

Simply enable the “Global Boot HD” option (it won’t assume CD32 with it), install Workbench, and launch a CD, and install the game like you would with DOS. The AmigaCD discs are not bootable.

Of course it is possible to create a bootable HDF from them afterwards, except of course if the game uses CDA tracks.

2 Likes
#3

Thank you so much for this very helpful reply.

I had a bit of trouble getting on with this, partially because the games in question don’t have an installer, they just run “out of the box” from the CD. It wasn’t easy, and most probably there are better ways to achieve this, but I got them to work following the example you mentioned.

I got Workbench 3.1 ADF install floppies, created a m3u playlist with them to be able to eject/insert at will. Initially I installed it on a prefixed 128MB HDF disk, but then I realized that all uninitialized HDF disks were just zero-filled files and since the game + Workbench fit inside 114MB I created a blank file with that size (123MB, which ended up as 114MB usable for the system).

After formatting the disk and installing the OS, I replaced the m3u content with just the game ISO and restarted, it could run the game fine from there, but still not quite the end result. Then I created a new app drawer on the disk and drag/drop’ed every file and folder from the CD to the new folder/drawer on the disk.

Finally, I created the appropriate commands inside Startup-sequence to just run the game at boot, similar approach to that other topic. Now I have an HDF file with the game that runs fine.

Maybe not the best nor most effective approach, but it’s working as intended so far.