Project Amigall
Those of you who are old enough will remember that
gaming on the Amiga, though entertaining, was a
rather slow process as games came in floppy disks.
Even with a second disk drive, there was a lot of
waiting involved, especially with games that came in
multiple disks. A few months after I purchased my
A1200, I bought a hard
disk so the problem was somewhat diminished, but far
from solved as only a small number of games were HD
installable. Back in those days, I dreamed that
someday I would be able to install every single
Amiga game there was in a hard disk! Of course, that
was impossible, not only because of the limited
installation options at the time but also because my
hard disk was only 340MB big (a hefty size for the
time, and very expensive too). Not to mention that I
of course didn't have every Amiga game there was!
Years passed, Amiga emulation evolved and so did my
own Amiga as it now has some extra RAM, a 4GB hard
disk and USB drives. Furthermore, the fantastic
software called WHDLoad gave us the opportunity to
put almost every Amiga game there was in our hard
disks. So I got to work to make my dream come true.
Naturally, simply installing all the games would not
do. I needed a proper frontend to run games from. I
found the answer in iGame, a program that does
exactly that. It scans your Amiga for WHDLoad games
and automatically puts them in a neat list for you
to choose from. Of course, there was more work
involved: I edited most of the names so that they
are 100% correct (ie "All New World of Lemmings"
instead of "Lemmings 3"), and I separated them in
categories (Platform, Sport etc.). It was hard work
but the result was very rewarding. I now have any
Amiga game I desire two clicks away, all I have to
do is double click on its name and it loads within
seconds. And I owe it all to these people:
- The
WinUAE team, because as much as I prefer
the real thing it's always easier to work on a
PC and then transfer everything
- The
WHDLoad team, for this awesome tool that
made hard disk installations a piece of cake
- Killergorilla, for his priceless
web site of
preinstalled games
- The
Poseidon team, because transferring data
to my Amiga before the USB days was a pain
- Emmanuel Vasilakis, for the gem that is
iGame
- Keropi, for giving me a hard disk for free
-
Bloodwych, for the screenshot pack
-
All the boys at the
English Amiga Board who are
always eager to answer questions
But enough chattering, let me show you some pictures
of my masterpiece. Note that although the
screenshots were taking from WinUAE, that is the
exact setup I use in my real Amiga, with the
exception of the resolution. Unlike the 640x512 you
see here, in my Amiga I am restricted to 640x256 as
I still use my Commodore 1084S monitor!
This is the first thing you see as soon as Workbench
is loaded
Behold iGame. More than 2000 titles!
Just type a few letters of the game you are
searching for a quick find
The titles are neatly divided into categories
Editing a slave's properties (activating infinite
lives etc.) is also easy
Just double click on a title and you'll be playing
the game within seconds!
And this is what my real Amiga looks like
If you are using iGame,
click here to download
more than 2,400 256x128 16 color IFF screenshots.
