![[igame.png]](pics/igame.png)
Pictured above is a program called iGame, it organizes all of the WHDload games and allows you to launch them easily. All of the games, are originally Amiga games, but are modified in a way to allow you to run them on Workbench (Amiga's OS). You see, back in the day most Amiga games would load off of the floppy drive, you would insert the floppy and start your Amiga. From there the Amiga would read the floppy, load it and run. There would be no Workbench running in the background, when you wanted to go back to the operating system, you would take out the floppy and restart the computer.
As you can imagine, that is a big PITA, not to mention requires a ton of floppy disks if you want a lot of games. Plus there is the fact, that a lot of these floppy drives are the first thing to go in computers. So there was a demand for a better solution. And a team of creative geniuses created such a solution. Thus WHDLoad was born. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it mounts those disks, runs all of the necessary software they would normally require such as different roms these games were built around, and allows you to play while you are running in WorkBench. No more floppies required, no restarts, just open a file and WHDLoad takes care of all of it for you.
It is a great way to play all of your games with little to no effort. Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no way to take screenshots while it is running, and for me, it requires me to remove my wireless PCMCIA card because it crashes otherwise.
![[wbgames.png]](pics/wbgames.png)
There are other games available as well, many of which run on workbench, such as the one shown above. It doesn't use very much memory at all. Ofcourse, you also have games such as Hexen, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Duke 3d, Gloom Deluxe, etc which all can run on top of the OS as well.
If I were to take a guess, I would imagine most of the games in the earlier days did not install on the hard drive, because hard drives were still expensive. As time progressed, more people got hard drives and more games started to be developed to run on them. By the time I got to the scene, the Amiga 1200 had already been out for a few years, and the one I bought came with the HDD.
The floppy disk games would come with portions of the OS they would use, their own configuration for how the OS would work, and expect to use an onboard ROM chip to make various calls, so it was not an easy matter for most people to run them on top of the OS, a suitable environment would be necessary to get them to run correctly.
Anyway, this is the reason I usually can not get screenshots of so many of the fantastic games available for the Amiga. In yesterday's blog I wrote about being excited for installing Gloom Deluxe, this game is based off a floppy game, the developers later changed it to run off the HDD, and also included a few goodies to make it look a lot nicer.
![[day7.png]](pics/day7.png)
Picture compliments of my daughter
Well, today marks day 7 of Amiga-Month! I have been having a great time, and never find myself feeling miserable without my PC. You must understand, I can easily be at my computer for over eight hours a day. This is not something to be proud of, but outside of family, computers are my life.
This is not a simple matter of a person who barely touches a computer at all, just pushing off from his/her hour or two a day away from the computer =) Nope, I'm a fanatic. I imagine a lot of you are as well.
If for some reason I could never go back to the latest of computers, I think I could get by fine enough using this computer as my main system. We'll see though, I still have another three weeks to go. It is easy enough to lay such a claim this early in.
I will say this though, if I were on my PC, most of my time spent would have been on social networks such as youtube, watching videos, reading horrible news on yahoo, leaving comments, and playing online games. All of these things, often lead into rings of people interested in drama, and me being so bored, would easily take up the bait and get involved as well.
Since I have been on the Amiga, I have been too busy enjoying the system itself, to preoccupy myself with such trivialities, which consist little more than beating ones chest, and arguing with others.
Computers are great, I love them, I love goofing around with them even more. But when they have become so simple, that it takes literally no effort other than hitting the power switch to get them going, I get bored. Right now, I much prefer the challenges of using this old computer.