How to Strip Down MEGA-AGS?

[zorrobandito]

Hi Amiga lovers and SMEs,

I'd like to put a few of my favourite Amiga arcade games on my cabinet. The cabinet doesn't have a keyboard or mouse and I'd like to leverage MEGA-AGS' superb controller friendly interface but with only my favourites. I'd like to save the space on the memory card and not have the unwanted games there - so a filter is no good.

I did drop into workbench and managed to delete the WHDLoad directory for the game but I don't know how to modify/regenerate the menu list.

Has anyone done something similar and can point me in the right direction?

[fierman]

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=68818 this thread goes into the details of the working and configuration of the menu system.

sourcecode is here: https://github.com/MagerValp/ArcadeGameSelector

[Optiroc]

The script to generate MegaAGS is available here.

Unfortunately there's many gotchas that make it pretty difficult to roll up an image:
- You need to create a base HDF containing (at the very least) the copyrighted Workbench files needed to boot (libraries from LIBS:, commands from C:, etc).
- You need to run the thing on macOS or Linux with a filesystem that supports weird filenames (Windows filesystems do not), and also be able to fulfill the other prerequisites listed.

[Wickedwijn]

Hi zorrobandito,

I'm busy trying to do sort of the same thing. I also want to save some GB's on my SD-card for the MiSTer FPGA.
I've spend over a month trying out all 3000+ games. After filtering out all the bad stuff I still ended up with 1100+ games!
Now I want to put these games on a new HDF and run MEGA-AGS on it.
I first did a test with the 10 year old AGS2 version (by MagerValp) on my PC with a WinUAE emulator and I got that one working.

Now I'm trying to get MEGA-AGS to work on a smaller HDF image. Work in progress.
I'm doing it step by step.

Creating new lists manually is easy. You need 3 files for a game you want to add:
*.iff - Image file of the game
*.run - Run file with command lines to load game
*.txt - Text file with the game information (Title, Developer, Publisher etc..)

These 3 files can be found in all the folders that end with '.ags' inside the main AGS2 drawer on the Amiga drive.
Don't throw away all these files, because creating these files by yourself is time consuming.

[Optiroc]

Since the original goal of AGSImager was to automate the exact thing you're doing, I will do a few things to make the build process more portable. It should at the very least be possible to make it run on Windows using WSL. Shoot me a PM if you're interested and want to help iron out the potential issues!

[petarku]

Since the original goal of AGSImager was to automate the exact thing you're doing, I will do a few things to make the build process more portable. It should at the very least be possible to make it run on Windows using WSL. Shoot me a PM if you're interested and want to help iron out the potential issues!

Last time when i was looking into AGSImager i was searching for the way to create all those files by script. My use case would be , download all latest whdload lha files , run script and create 3 files needed for AGS per game automatically. I saw there was some mapping between some exact versions of whdload games so couldnt make it working on the end. Is this possible at the moment ?

[Optiroc]

Last time when i was looking into AGSImager i was searching for the way to create all those files by script. My use case would be , download all latest whdload lha files , run script and create 3 files needed for AGS per game automatically. I saw there was some mapping between some exact versions of whdload games so couldnt make it working on the end. Is this possible at the moment ?

Yep, you just need to run the indexer first ("make index"). It will search through the content directories and update the database with the files/versions found.

[Wickedwijn]

I got the MEGA-AGS working on smaller HDF image manually.
It wasn't that hard. Only had to figure out what files were used by setvadjust.
Creating my own lists is not what I'm planning to do. Using a configscript would be my choice of options.

Since the original goal of AGSImager was to automate the exact thing you're doing, I will do a few things to make the build process more portable.

I looked at the AGSImager, but I didn't realise it was meant for self created hard disk sized images.
I'm a Windows user so I'll have to dive in WSL first. Never used or heard of it.

How dynamic is the program?
Let's say I'm not using the standard folders 0,A,B...Z but I'm using folders named by genre. Can it still make an index?

[petarku]

Last time when i was looking into AGSImager i was searching for the way to create all those files by script. My use case would be , download all latest whdload lha files , run script and create 3 files needed for AGS per game automatically. I saw there was some mapping between some exact versions of whdload games so couldnt make it working on the end. Is this possible at the moment ?

Yep, you just need to run the indexer first ("make index"). It will search through the content directories and update the database with the files/versions found.

thanks Optiroc , I will look into this during next week.
I have another question, as i really like look and feel from mega ags and also grouping of games that you guys did , what i would like is to create one image based on that for my PAL amiga 1200 . Is there an easy way to do it with your script? I would want to force PAL on everything and to get rid of share folder etc.

[Optiroc]

How dynamic is the program?
Let's say I'm not using the standard folders 0,A,B...Z but I'm using folders named by genre. Can it still make an index?

Yep, the indexer doesn't care about the folder structure except the first level ("game", "demo" etc, which were needed because I had some games and demos with the same slave name, so the top level directory name is used together with slave name as the unique identifier).

thanks Optiroc , I will look into this during next week.
I have another question, as i really like look and feel from mega ags and also grouping of games that you guys did , what i would like is to create one image based on that for my PAL amiga 1200 . Is there an easy way to do it with your script? I would want to force PAL on everything and to get rid of share folder etc.

Sure, that would be pretty easy to configure once you have the imager setup running. It would mostly involve some changes in the generated "run"-scripts to strip a few things.

[Optiroc]

How dynamic is the program?
Let's say I'm not using the standard folders 0,A,B...Z but I'm using folders named by genre. Can it still make an index?

That said, the menu structure of the resulting HDF is has no relation to the directory structure of the source archives, if that was what you asked. The menu structure is defined by a yaml file, and then there's also the option to include the "alphabetic" and "by year" lists which are automatically generated.

If there was good metadata in the database for genre the script could also generate folders based on that. There is a "genre" field in the database that was scraped from HOL when I first started the project. It would require a massive amount of cleanup and additions to be good enough to use though.

(edit: But goddamnit, now I won't be able to put down that thought :))

[Wickedwijn]

Yep, the indexer doesn't care about the folder structure except the first level ("game", "demo" etc, which were needed because I had some games and demos with the same slave name, so the top level directory name is used together with slave name as the unique identifier).

Ok. That's good to know and logic too. It's good enough that it creates an "alphabetic" and "year" list. I can always create/generate a genre list myself, if I want to.

I always store my games in folders named by genres from long ago. It has more logic than an alphabet.
I find it easier to search games through genres. When you have over 3000 games, and you don't know from the title what kind of game it is, the genre is a nice first indication.

Thanks Optiroc and sorry I reminded you of a scraped "genre" field in the project.

[fulg]

Since the original goal of AGSImager was to automate the exact thing you're doing, I will do a few things to make the build process more portable. It should at the very least be possible to make it run on Windows using WSL. Shoot me a PM if you're interested and want to help iron out the potential issues!

I can confirm that AGSImager works fine on WSL2 (using the Ubuntu container), I can almost rebuild the existing MegaAGS archive by hand (of course the hardest part is procuring all of the source material!). I stripped out the existing MegaAGS.hdf to get the required base files and most of the content to rebuild it, now I can work on adding new stuff and submitting it.

[zorrobandito]

Creating new lists manually is easy. You need 3 files for a game you want to add:
*.iff - Image file of the game
*.run - Run file with command lines to load game
*.txt - Text file with the game information (Title, Developer, Publisher etc..)

These 3 files can be found in all the folders that end with '.ags' inside the main AGS2 drawer on the Amiga drive.
Don't throw away all these files, because creating these files by yourself is time consuming.

This was very helpful. I've trimmed down the Amiga contents by using Directory Opus on the MEGA-AGS workbench and all works with updated lists.
Tip-top. But it doesn't decrease the size of the hdf. How can I write the newly sized Amiga disk back out to an hdf?

[Malor]

I'm not aware of any resizers for Amiga virtual hard drives. The way I'd probably do it is to make a new, smaller image, mount that, and do a copy all clone from one volume to the other. After the big image is detached, you may need to rename the small image to be the name the big image had for everything to work right.

[limi]

And then ideally have to make sure it is formatted as PFS to avoid corruption using HDToolbox, etc etc. It’s probably not worth it if you’re trying to save space — invest $20-50 in a larger SD card instead.

I do get the impulse to create a smaller set of games for easy browsing of your favorites (and I encourage that, having your own favorites is great!), but trying to save 6GB when you have to educate yourself on the finer details of Amiga file systems is probably a lot more hassle than it’s worth

[Malor]

Yeah, I was thinking about all that. Dealing with hard drives correctly on the Amiga is a serious hassle. Getting the new image formatted with PFS, so that it's stable and reliable, will likely cause you substantial grief. If you format it with the default FFS, it will corrupt itself very, very easily.

You're much better off using the bigger image with PFS than a smaller image without.

As limi says, buy a bigger microSD instead of fooling with making a new image. It's not worth the pain.