Loading Amiga Roms best practice?

philtomo

Just wondering can you launch Amiga roms direct from the Rom (like you can via SNES emulator) or do you have to launch them everytime through the emulator?
Its not a big deal I just wondered.
Using WinUAE via Retropie on a Raspberry Pi 3

thanks

sirhenrythe5th

Just started with amiga emulation yesterday :)
I choosed "AmiBerry" and this Emulator does what you want to: launch games by clicking them in the gamelist.
IMO it is the best way to have some kind of "consolized amiga", works pretty well with all the games i tested.
You should use *.lha-files (WHDLoader) for it, no disk changing, no disk-loading times ;)

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th said in Loading Amiga Roms best practice?:

Just started with amiga emulation yesterday :)
I choosed "AmiBerry" and this Emulator does what you want to: launch games by clicking them in the gamelist.
IMO it is the best way to have some kind of "consolized amiga", works pretty well with all the games i tested.
You should use *.lha-files (WHDLoader) for it, no disk changing, no disk-loading times ;)

Is there a clear tutorial on how to use WHDLoader for this emulator?

sirhenrythe5th

@davidgrohl there is a lot of docs you can read given on the amiberry HP and their Installation-guides.
But to be honest: you dont have to.
All you need are the files in *.lha - just drop them in the "~/roms/amiga/"-folder and start them from the gamelist.
As far as you have also the kickstart-files in the "~/bios/"-folder everything works right from the start.
So you dont have to mess arround with WHDLoader at all - amiberry does that for you.

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th said in Loading Amiga Roms best practice?:

@davidgrohl there is a lot of docs you can read given on the amiberry HP and their Installation-guides.
But to be honest: you dont have to.
All you need are the files in *.lha - just drop them in the "~/roms/amiga/"-folder and start them from the gamelist.
As far as you have also the kickstart-files in the "~/bios/"-folder everything works right from the start.
So you dont have to mess arround with WHDLoader at all - amiberry does that for you.

@sirhenrythe5th great to hear this. I thought I need to configure WHDLoader and many other things.
What about controller configuration? Can I configure controls form retroach menu? Does it support libretro hotkey?
Thanks for your help.

sirhenrythe5th

@davidgrohl the Input mapping is taken over from your retroarch-settings, including the hotkey-combo to exit (start + select in most cases).
The combo for the Retroarch-GUI brings up the amiberry-GUI.
As mentioned above: the all-in-one-solution for playing amiga just like a console :)

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th said in Loading Amiga Roms best practice?:

@davidgrohl the Input mapping is taken over from your retroarch-settings, including the hotkey-combo to exit (start + select in most cases).
As mentioned above: the all-in-one-solution for playing amiga just like a console :)

Great. I'll give it a try tonight. I let you know asap.
Thanks a lot for halp.

sirhenrythe5th

@davidgrohl you are welcome!
I also waited for a long time to tinker with amiga emulation on the Pi.
But it was worth waiting - the newer versions 3.x.x are state of the art.
So much fun to reacitvate all the games that i had 30 years ago (sic! :D).

ExarKunIv

@sirhenrythe5th also thanks. i have been putting amiga off for a long time. thought there was too much involved
i will now have to give it a shot

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th I installed amiberry and I found a WHD games collection. The problem is that most games are in zip format and only few in lha. The lha ones work fine.
Do you have any suggestion?

sirhenrythe5th

@davidgrohl very simple solution: just unzip the files to get the contained lha-files 😉

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th said in Loading Amiga Roms best practice?:

@davidgrohl very simple solution: just unzip the files to get the contained lha-files 😉

The .zip doesn't contain .lha file. It contains a folder and a .info file. Inside the folder there are some files: generally there is a .info, a .slave and some others.

tuki_cat

@davidgrohl

If you have access to a Windows PC, then you can use IZArc to create a .lha using the files you have unzipped.

This is a zip program that supports the .lha format

sirhenrythe5th

I also had zipped files, but there were only lha inside, so i did not have that issue.
But i found one of the most common sites offering whdloader files - ready to go in lha.
Of course i cannot post a link, but you should find it easily.

davidgrohl

This post is deleted!

sirhenrythe5th

Might be helpflul concerning input mapping and i did not find this in the tutorials, F.A.Q. or installation guides:

If you want to change the input mapping it wont help if you use the overrides in "/opt/retropie/configs/amiberry/@retroarch.cfg"

But if you map your inputs in "/opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/controls/[nameofyourinputdevice].cfg" it works like a charm.

Had to do this myself because the A+B-Buttons of my 8BitDo-Pad were swapped to my regular RA-mapping ;)

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th said in Loading Amiga Roms best practice?:

Might be helpflul concerning input mapping and i did not find this in the tutorials, F.A.Q. or installation guides:

If you want to change the input mapping it wont help if you use the overrides in "/opt/retropie/configs/amiberry/@retroarch.cfg"

But if you map your inputs in "/opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/controls/[nameofyourinputdevice].cfg" it works like a charm.

Had to do this myself because the A+B-Buttons of my 8BitDo-Pad were swapped to my regular RA-mapping ;)

I tryied to edit that file but nothing changes when launch games.
Btw lots of games start but they need to press some keyboard buttons to start the to play.

sirhenrythe5th

Thats weird :/, on my setup, using a 8BitDoSF30Pro, it worked by editing the inputs for "button a" & "button b" in the relating file "8BitDoSF30Pro.cfg".
I have no idea why it is not working for you :/

Concerning the keys: i had an Amiga2000 from 1988-1991 and can confirm: that was quite common for these days. The joysticks had only one button, so it was not possible to start a 2-player game by pressing a joystick button.
There are some smarter ways as Giana Sisters did it (Joystick left=1 Player / Joystick right=2Player) but most of the games required a key pressed to start.

Two possible solutions: use mapping tools like "key2joy" to map Keyboard functions to a joypad or concentrate on CD32 and CDTV-Images. They are also supported by AmiBerry.

davidgrohl

@sirhenrythe5th said in Loading Amiga Roms best practice?:

Thats weird :/, on my setup, using a 8BitDoSF30Pro, it worked by editing the inputs for "button a" & "button b" in the relating file "8BitDoSF30Pro.cfg".
I have no idea why it is not working for you :/

Concerning the keys: i had an Amiga2000 from 1988-1991 and can confirm: that was quite common for these days. The joysticks had only one button, so it was not possible to start a 2-player game by pressing a joystick button.
There are some smarter ways as Giana Sisters did it (Joystick left=1 Player / Joystick right=2Player) but most of the games required a key pressed to start.

Two possible solutions: use mapping tools like "key2joy" to map Keyboard functions to a joypad or concentrate on CD32 and CDTV-Images. They are also supported by AmiBerry.

Ok, thanks. I'll give it a try tonight.

ballboff

@sirhenrythe5th yeah just bear in mind if you're going the CD32 route, that you'll need a lot more storage as they were stored on CD. The games will go from being a few meg in size, to a few hundred meg per game. Not all games were released on CD32 (about 175 in total i believe), but you have that guarantee that you have a console compatible system doing it that way, and you're gonna have more buttons than a zipstick say.