Are you growing tired of floppies? Have you ever played a game on your Amiga and encountered a dreadful read/write error? Maybe you’ve discovered that many of your old disks simply does not work anymore? Perhaps swapping disks when playing a game gets on your nerves?
If you’ve answered yes to one or more of those questions, then I’ve got some good news for you.
There’s a tool for the Amiga that solves all of the problems above. It is called WHDLoad and it’s only a couple of mouse clicks away..
About WHDLoad
WHDLoad is basically an AmigaOS friendly hard-drive install package that makes it possible to install hundreds upon hundreds of games and demos, which were designed to run from floppies, onto your hard-drive. This means that you can stop worrying about ageing floppies, disk swapping and much more. The games will load faster as well, since they are launched from a hard-drive. As a bonus, you can exit games with the keyboard and be brought straight back to Workbench. No need for a reboot!
With WHDLoad, you can play this classic game (Dogs of War) from your hard-drive. No need to run it from a floppy disk!
There are currently over 2000 game and demo installs available for download. Impressive numbers, don’t you think?
Installation and Requirements
WHDLoad is pretty easy to use. Just unpack the archive on your Amiga, double-click on the installer icon and the script does the rest.
You can find the downloads here.
The requirements for the package is as follows:
- 68000 CPU (68010 and higher is recommend, since some installs require the FBR for the “quit by a key” feature)
- Kickstart 2.0 (version 37 and higher)
- 1MB of RAM (the amount of RAM can often depend on the installed game or demo)
Depending on the game or demo, you might need a Kickstart ROM as well. Such a ROM can be extracted from an original machine, be it an Amiga 500 or Amiga 1200 for example. If you have the Amiga Forever package from Cloanto, you can use the ROM’s included there. WHDLoad has integrated support for the ROM’s provided by Cloanto.
If you’d like to know more about the requirements, please have a look here.
I’d also like to use the opportunity to encourage people who use WHDLoad to register if they haven’t done so already. Doing that supports the continuing development of the software and the future of the Amiga platform. Let’s show these guys that they deserve some credit for their hard work! 
I’ve registered my version of WHDLoad and it’s quite cool to see my name popping up whenever I launch a game. 
Where to get Games and Demos
Many people have games and demos on floppies that can be installed easily with the WHDLoad installers. Others might not. If you don’t have any software on disks that you’d like to have installed, you can download complete pre-installed game packages on the Internet.
My favourite website for this purpose is called WHDownLoad. This site contains hundreds upon hundreds of cool games (and demos) for you to download. The games are packed with ZIP and can be unpacked on your Amiga or WinUAE configuration. After the game has been unpacked, just double-click on the respective icon and the action starts right away.. can’t get any easier than that! Kudos most go out to Magix for providing this fantastic resource of software for the community. Did I mention that you can get Superfrog, Virocop, Breathless, Alien Breed 3D, Project X and Dune from this website? Excellent!
Another website worth mentioning is the KGWHD – Preinstalled WHDLoad Packs. It is maintained by KillerGorilla. Here you can find huge packs with vast amounts of pre-installed games and demos for download. A must see!
Last Words
I hope this post has been of help to some of you out there. I’ve had a lot of fun with WHDLoad myself and I think it’s great to have so many quality games easily accessible on my Amiga 1200. Even though it is fun using floppies from time to time, it’s great to have everything ready to go with the a simple double-click. That you can exit the game whenever you want and be brought back to Workbench is awesome as well. If you use the Amiga, have installed a hard-drive and love games and demos, you should check out WHDLoad. You won’t regret it!
All this talk about WHDLoad makes me want to have a go at Project X (WHDLoad version of course.. ).
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