Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
1 2 3 4 5
Thread: These games are great, but.....
Brintinacx 15:18 20th April 2008
I am currently playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. A game I wanted when I had my Amiga, but never purchased. I wish I had, gives the King's Quest series a run for their money. I also am enjoying all my old favorites. I did, however, forget how long some of these games take to load. I know I'm on a machine that isn't quite my Quad-Core Proccessor, but the programmers could have helped out a bit. In Indiana Jones, just to see him get in a car and drive away, I have to go from disk 2, to 4, to 11, to 3. First of all, I am in no way a programmer, but man, do they think before they do something? Why wouldn't all that data have been put on one disk, so I don't have to swap, just to see him get in a car and drive off! LoL. For arguments sake, let's say there was too much data for one disk (rediculous I know, but let's play along), why in God's name wouldn't you put it on disks 2, 3, 4, 5, in that order. I mean, jump to disk 11? Did they forget the car door opening, and throw it on disk 11 at the last minute? Seems silly to me, but again I'm not a programmer. Despite silly stuff like that, that bugs me, I am still enjoying my trip down Memory Lane.
[Reply]
AlexJ 19:28 20th April 2008
I think it was intended (or recommended at least) to be Hard Disk installed by the user rather than played off the floppies. You can emulate hard disks etc. in WinUAE which may make the experience more enjoyable.

Also note that by default WinUAE tries to emulate floppy read times of the Amiga exactly. You can crank it up to 8x read speed in the options, although this may cause problems (not in my experience).
[Reply]
Graham Humphrey 19:32 20th April 2008
Yes, it's fair to say they weren't exactly designed with the floppy user in mind and given the size of most of these types of games it's a bit difficult to see how they could be.
[Reply]
Buleste 09:41 21st April 2008
If i remember rightly Beneath A Steel Sky was even worse and you had 15 disks to contend with.
[Reply]
J T 18:49 21st April 2008
Man, and I thought the original Monkey Island was a pain with 4 disks. I never even had an external drive
[Reply]
Submeg 23:44 21st April 2008
Yea I always wondered about that....it's like that for Dragon's Lair...how odd!
[Reply]
Demon Cleaner 13:28 23rd April 2008
That is also why the game made me go crazy when I played it, I didn't have a HDD back then. But nowadays installing it to HDD in WinUAE is absolutely no problem, and you can fully enjoy the game without swapping.
[Reply]
Harrison 13:38 23rd April 2008
And if you do happen to find a multi disk game that doesn't directly support HD installation, these days it is also easy thanks to WHDLoad as you can now install them to HD.

I remember before owning an HD playing some Amiga games on loads of disks and it was quite a nightmare. Some adventure games have their files scattered across the disks in quite a random way making you do 3 or 4 disk swaps within a few seconds of each other at certain points in the games. BASS comes to mind as one of the worst at this. I assume this was to optimise how much they could fit onto each disk, but it didn't make the games very nice to play form floppy disk. Getting an HD for the first time and running these games from it was amazing.
[Reply]
Buleste 14:30 23rd April 2008
If i remember rightly with BASS even the install was swapping disks at random. Another bad one although better than others was Simon the Sorcerer and Waxworks (good games though). I remember when i first bought a HDD for my 1200 (a whapping 170MG) and installed these games. I have never been in love like that since.
[Reply]
Brintinacx 23:10 29th April 2008
Is there a tutorial here on how to install to HD?
[Reply]
Tags:Array
1 2 3 4 5
Up