May 19, 2013 at 12:37Wasted Dreams. Quick Start Guide
Yesterday, the respected Weilard posted a wonderful post about the game Wasted Dreams .
The description turned out so colorful that I (I think, and many others) wanted to see the game. Unfortunately, in the original article there is no sequence of steps to run the game in the emulator.
Surely this is not a problem for those who have known the Amiga platform for a long time, however, I hope that this post will help someone both launch the game and look at the old, but rather unusual platform.
In addition, the seemingly trivial approach to emulating a CD image for set-top boxes with a CD drive did not work in this case, I had to go by a simple, but consisting of many small steps, workaround.
Welcome to kat for the details of running Wasted Dreams on your computer!
Something caught the game, and the process of launching and bringing it to work is interesting in itself. I myself am by no means a player, however, despite this, I promised the author yesterday that I would reproduce and describe the launch process.
Note: this is not the only, and perhaps not the easiest or fastest way. Nevertheless, it is efficient, it does not require searching for rare ROM images and mounting a CD in Amigu (I couldn’t reliably run ROMs from CDTV and CD32).
I cannot but note that working with both the platform itself and the WInUAE emulator is not entirely obvious; So, now it seems unusual that the user has a choice to either start the game or the shell. Thus, the games obtained are not tied to the OS, and the developers were forced to implement a significant part of the OS functionality in each game.
So. What we need?
Download all the necessary files. The image of Wasted Dreams was packed by somemaniacs ; in fact, it is a Rar archive of 41 volumes, a file with the extension .000 needs to be opened using the archiver and begin to unpack the files. If the archiver asks for the next part, specify the file with the extension .001, then it will pick it up by itself.
I recommend mounting the image with the game as a CD-drive or unzipping files from it to a temporary directory.
Unpack the ROM files somewhere (for example, in Public / Amiga Files / KS-ROMs) and the disk image from the Workbench (for example, in Public / Amiga Files / Harddrives).
Install WinUAE, run.
She swears at the lack of ROM files. To solve the problem, go to the Paths tab in the window that opens and specify in the first field - System ROMs - the path to the directory containing Kickstart ROM 3.1 for Amiga 1200.
Return to the Quickstart tab, select the A1200 model, no other settings need to be changed.
As you know, Amiga devices used roughly the following joysticks:
or 
Leaman Computing Ltd
Wasted Dreams - a game for one or two players, so you need to configure the joysticks on the Game ports tab like this. In my opinion, playing with the mouse is extremely inconvenient and inaccurate, I set the first joystick to wasd, and the second to hjkl. If you have numpad, the second joystick by default uses the keys on it.
You can switch between the control method for each of the players in the game itself (Keyboard, Joystick 1, Joystick 2), while the control in the menu is tied to the first player, that is, if you reconfigure it from Keyboard to Joystick 1, and he, in in turn, by default WinUAE will remain configured for the mouse - get ready to change the settings with the mouse.
In the game itself, keyboard control is not the most familiar (arrows for moving, Shift is assigned to perform an action - pick up an object, hit), but generally convenient.
Rather, the last before you plunge into the game.
In the WinUAE settings window, finally click Start. If you configured ROM and the first hard drive correctly, you will see the Workbench desktop.
If you correctly specified the second hard drive, it will be displayed as an icon on the desktop.
I repeat the title of the WinUAE window: in order to “return” the mouse cursor in Windows, you can switch to another window by Alt + Tab, or call the settings window by F12.
After completing all the settings, go to the Configurations tab and click Save there if you want to replace the default configuration, or name it differently.
Attention! “Default” (at least for version 2.6.0) is not the configuration that will be loaded when the program restarts, but the configuration that will be selected first when going to this tab. On the other hand, this is better than re-setting the parameters from scratch.
Initially, I planned to make some kind of assembly from the emulator and the game so that it could be downloaded and launched with one click.
Technically, this does not cause problems; WinUAE works well with relative paths. Unfortunately, to run the game you need too many components that are associated with licenses and therefore the distribution of such an assembly will be illegal.
Nevertheless, I hope this article will help you to complete the necessary steps and launch this unusual game.
The description turned out so colorful that I (I think, and many others) wanted to see the game. Unfortunately, in the original article there is no sequence of steps to run the game in the emulator.
Surely this is not a problem for those who have known the Amiga platform for a long time, however, I hope that this post will help someone both launch the game and look at the old, but rather unusual platform.
In addition, the seemingly trivial approach to emulating a CD image for set-top boxes with a CD drive did not work in this case, I had to go by a simple, but consisting of many small steps, workaround.
Welcome to kat for the details of running Wasted Dreams on your computer!
Something caught the game, and the process of launching and bringing it to work is interesting in itself. I myself am by no means a player, however, despite this, I promised the author yesterday that I would reproduce and describe the launch process.
Note: this is not the only, and perhaps not the easiest or fastest way. Nevertheless, it is efficient, it does not require searching for rare ROM images and mounting a CD in Amigu (I couldn’t reliably run ROMs from CDTV and CD32).
I cannot but note that working with both the platform itself and the WInUAE emulator is not entirely obvious; So, now it seems unusual that the user has a choice to either start the game or the shell. Thus, the games obtained are not tied to the OS, and the developers were forced to implement a significant part of the OS functionality in each game.
So. What we need?
- The image of the game: http://www.emuparadise.me/Amiga_CD_ISOs/Wasted_Dreams_(1999)/137027-download . It should download quickly and without problems.
- Emulator Amiga. WinUAE is quite suitable: www.winuae.net/files/InstallWinUAE2600.exe
- DirectX optional, but speeds up the process. I don’t provide a link, because in the absence of any components (for example, on bare Windows 8) WinUAE will itself offer to download and install them. Microsoft's web installer does not require a reboot, the only thing is to consider whether you need a Bing Bar.
- Image from Amiga Workbench: planetemu.net/index.php?section=roms&dat=116&action=showrom&id=82954
- Kickstart ROM files. They are the intellectual property of Cloanto, and you need to purchase an Amiga Forever emulator or make an image of the microcircuit that is in your Amiga.
Exclusively for Amiga 1200 owners, I’ll provide a link to Kickstart 3.1 rev. 40.68 for the Amiga 1200 to save them from having to read it by hand. For other users, I recommend that you buy Amiga Forever from Cloanto or otherwise get a pack of Amiga Kickstart ROMs.
Step one. File preparation
Download all the necessary files. The image of Wasted Dreams was packed by some
I recommend mounting the image with the game as a CD-drive or unzipping files from it to a temporary directory.
Unpack the ROM files somewhere (for example, in Public / Amiga Files / KS-ROMs) and the disk image from the Workbench (for example, in Public / Amiga Files / Harddrives).
Step Two Emulator Training
Install WinUAE, run.
She swears at the lack of ROM files. To solve the problem, go to the Paths tab in the window that opens and specify in the first field - System ROMs - the path to the directory containing Kickstart ROM 3.1 for Amiga 1200.
Return to the Quickstart tab, select the A1200 model, no other settings need to be changed.
Step Three Fine tuning
- Go to the CPU tab. We select 68020, remove the 24-bit addressing checkbox, enable JIT and FPU 68881.
- On the Chipset tab, make sure AGA is selected.
- On the ROM tab, only the first slot should be non-empty. Operation verified with KS ROM v3.1 (A1200) rev 40.68 (512k) [391773-01 / 391774-01].
- On the RAM tab, add Fast RAM up to 8 megabytes
- The most interesting thing happens with the disks. On the Hard drives tab, first add the Hardfile with the Workbench, the device must be DH0 and be bootable.
Then add “Directory or Archive”, namely the directory with the game files. In my case, this is a mounted image of Wasted Dreams on J :. We remove the Bootable checkbox, the device can be called DH1, DH2, and so on.
The fourth step. Management setting
As you know, Amiga devices used roughly the following joysticks:
or Leaman Computing Ltd
Wasted Dreams - a game for one or two players, so you need to configure the joysticks on the Game ports tab like this. In my opinion, playing with the mouse is extremely inconvenient and inaccurate, I set the first joystick to wasd, and the second to hjkl. If you have numpad, the second joystick by default uses the keys on it.
You can switch between the control method for each of the players in the game itself (Keyboard, Joystick 1, Joystick 2), while the control in the menu is tied to the first player, that is, if you reconfigure it from Keyboard to Joystick 1, and he, in in turn, by default WinUAE will remain configured for the mouse - get ready to change the settings with the mouse.
In the game itself, keyboard control is not the most familiar (arrows for moving, Shift is assigned to perform an action - pick up an object, hit), but generally convenient.
The last step. Launch
Rather, the last before you plunge into the game.
In the WinUAE settings window, finally click Start. If you configured ROM and the first hard drive correctly, you will see the Workbench desktop.
If you correctly specified the second hard drive, it will be displayed as an icon on the desktop.
I repeat the title of the WinUAE window: in order to “return” the mouse cursor in Windows, you can switch to another window by Alt + Tab, or call the settings window by F12.
After completing all the settings, go to the Configurations tab and click Save there if you want to replace the default configuration, or name it differently.
Attention! “Default” (at least for version 2.6.0) is not the configuration that will be loaded when the program restarts, but the configuration that will be selected first when going to this tab. On the other hand, this is better than re-setting the parameters from scratch.
Instead of a conclusion
Initially, I planned to make some kind of assembly from the emulator and the game so that it could be downloaded and launched with one click.
Technically, this does not cause problems; WinUAE works well with relative paths. Unfortunately, to run the game you need too many components that are associated with licenses and therefore the distribution of such an assembly will be illegal.
Nevertheless, I hope this article will help you to complete the necessary steps and launch this unusual game.