MiSTer FPGA Forum

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?

Optiroc wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 2:01 pm 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 wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 2:48 pm 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 wrote: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.

Optiroc wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 6:25 pm

petarku wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 2:48 pm 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 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 10:51 amHow 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 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:53 am 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.

Wickedwijn wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 10:51 am 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?

Optiroc wrote: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).

Optiroc wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 2:01 pm 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!

Wickedwijn wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 12:25 am

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?

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.

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

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.