During a brief mission into our garage on Saturday morning, I stumbled across a box of my old Amiga games. It contained a few boxes (Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge, Strider, Player Manager, Pro Tennis Tour 2..) and a load of loose disks. I'd forgotten when we'd moved into our current house that I'd kinda dumped all my Amiga stuff in various random places. Somewhere there lurks a black bin liner full of disks (really need to find that now) and there are other boxed games lurking elsewhere (James Pond is in a box of retro gamer mags in the spare room, and Kick Off 2 is safely tucked away with some Star Wars stuff. But its got me thinking - I really need to find it all, and sort it all out and store it properly. Chances are a lot of the disks no longer work (I'm not sure what the lifespan of a floppy disk is, especially one that's been in a garage for about 4 years). For some reason, I'd carefully stored away my CD32 games in with my console games, but the floppies are all over the place. Shame on me.
As a result of this, I've been digging out my old Amiga emulation stuff. I'd downloaded the latest version of WinUAE (the emulator) and various CDs with ADF files (the game disk files) and got a few running. Then after visiting everyones favourite Amiga site, LemonAmiga.com I discovered Lemonade - a nice frontend / database / for WinUAE. I was really impressed, but discovered its no longer a live concern and the database is a little out of date etc etc.. but got pointed in the direction of GameBase Amiga. I'd previously come across GameBase when doing my old SNES website, but hadn't realised there was an Amiga part for it. Basically, it's a huge database of games for various systems, which contains details of each game, when it was made, who made it, etc etc but also with the ability to link into your emulator and games. I quickly googled "GameBase Amiga" and found a download page. This page is very basic, saying it's a holding page until the real site gets re-done, but it would appear to have been created in 2009 so I guess that's not going to happen. Anyway, there is the download for Gamebase Amiga and something else, but theres also a directory there. This directory contains real treasure :-) Theres a 7z (fancy zip format) file containing screenshots for all the games, another containing music from the games, another containing extras (box scans, hints n tips documents etc) and another labelled games. The games file is just over 2gb, but after downloading I found it contained something along the lines of 3000+ games.
So, download all the above.
You'll also need to download and install the latest Gamebase programme. A quick google will provide you with the homepage where you can download it. Once you've installed that, you can install the Gamebase Amiga programme. That will say something about needing version 1.11 of Gamebase but it can't detect anything after v1.12 and the latest is 1.13 so you can proceed and ignore any messages.
Once you've installed that, download and install WinUAE (you will need to find some Kickstart ROM files, which could be the hard part).
After installing WinUAE, start up Gamebase.. It'll do some database updates and then prompt you to set up your emulator. You'll probably need to manually browse and point it at your winuae.exe file.
Once you've done that… unzip the games file, the extras, the screenshots etc (put them in subdirectories under the gamebase amiga directory), then go to the menu option that lets you specify paths and point the relevant sections at these. Then restart Gamebase to pick them up.
You should now see nice screenshots for most of the games, as well as be able to view the extras and marvel in nostalgia at the old game box scans :-) You should also be able to "Play Game". If, like me, you click Play Game and get taken to the Workbench "Insert disk" screen, then you need to do a small file hack to fix the issue. You should be able to find the solution via a quick google, otherwise let me know and I'll dig out the link.
That should get you up and running :-)
If you have a wired Xbox controller, you should be able to get this working in Windows and be able to play using it. I'd got this working on my previous laptop for Mame stuff, so don't see why this won't work for WinUAE (am now ready to be proved wrong).
Be sure to pay LemonAmiga a visit. It's a cracking site, with a decent user community and forums.
Plus for most games, theres links to where you might be able to find the corresponding ADF files..
Remember kids: Piracy is BAD.
In other gaming news, I picked up Test Drive Unlimited 2 yesterday. Really enjoyed the first one, and despite mixed reviews I thought I'd give the new one a blast. I've not had the chance to try it yet, but will report back when I do.
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