I develop hard-drive installers for WHDLoad. Basically, this involves making a small program (called an 'imager') to copy the game from its old and worn out floppy disk onto a user's hard disk. Then a 'loader' is written which loads and patches the game so that it does all its loading and saving to the hard disk instead of floppy. Also, things like misuse of hardware, anti-hack protection, and good old fashioned bugs are removed.
All installers work with no need to access the disk drive, and they all have a key you can press to quit back to your Workbench. They also work with Amiga emulators for other machines.
- Captain Planet for WHDLoad has hiscore saves and cheats.
- Crazy Sue for WHDLoad has hiscore saves.
- Crazy Sue II for WHDLoad.
- Extension demo for WHDLoad.
- Fatal Mission for WHDLoad has hiscore saves.
- Giddy 2: Hero in an Egg Shell for WHDLoad.
- Pinball Fantasies AGA has hiscore saves and a lovely menu frontend.
- Wibble World Giddy for WHDLoad.
- Voyage demo for WHDLoad.
- I also wrote Turrican 2 and SpinDizzy Worlds installers for JST, which is a defunct competitor of WHDLoad.
All installers come with the full sourcecode, but I do not currently include any of the reverse-engineering datas I create while making the installer. All my installers that read from disk use a very simple piece of code called diskreader.asm. There is no need for 10kb programs to read a disk format, or special programs to run 'slaves' just to read a disk. Most of my disk-reading programs are under 1kb, and require no external utilities. It can read normal and raw disks, and create both entire disk images and individual files.