A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

May I call your attention to this video of my proof-of-concept WHDLoad Install Manager?

WHDLoad is a great tool for keeping classic Amiga stuff from the trackloading times accessible. But obtaining and installing the required images and slaves can be a chore, since it doesn't come with a package manager. So I made it my current hobby project and started working on one!

This video is a demo of the current state after a few evenings. It shows how easy it is now to install and run stuff. I chose to demonstrate this with the demos Groovy, Crayon Shinchan, Roots, one after another without rebooting. Please note that each install simply required a single command to be issued!

How would you use this, if at all? Please let me know what you think. Thanks

I think it will be more useful to spend your time on a new demo:) More seriously i didn't know that python exist for amiga, it will help a lot for command line automation.

(Wanted to post this yesterday night, but the slightly mis-configured Anti-flood protection of this site did not let me do it. "Anti-flood protection: the system prevents you from making more than one post every 60 seconds!" It really should compare times when I submit, not when I start to write. And it seemed to let me wait 3000 seconds, i.e. 50 minutes, before I could post again after having done a single post before - bugger. So to bed I went instead.)

Python on Amiga has been around since at least 1995, as I recently found out. But I did not take notice of it back then, maybe as I just started learning assembler at that time. The newest version I could find for OS3.x was some 2.3.3 alpha version, but I can't recommend that. The Amiga Python v2.0 by Irmen de Jong is pretty good and I can definitely recommend it. He is the orignal author of the port. Python 2.0 doesn't have True/False, so I just define my own True/False variables at the top of my sources to be compatible with later Python version on PC, where I do the actual programming.

If only we had a later v2.5 or newer on Amiga! Then I would have sqlite3 module available, which could be a nice way of storing the data for my project. My cleaned database currently contains 21 mags, 225 demos, 14 games, and 17 ctros. All data imported as much as possible from whdload, then patched to supply the missing links and bits of information that are needed to perform fully automatic installation. So far I circumenvented analysing the install scripts by a matter of priciple (sloppy 90s stuff), but I reckon I have to look into that now. It's all starting to shape up, but there is also still a lot to do.

I think most people just download finished WHDLoad installs from whdownload.com these days, but you could advertise the project in the official WHDLoad forum on eab.abime.net to make more users aware of it.

Good idea about that forum. It is probably better suited to this idea. I'll tell them at some point, but first I need to empty my todo-list a bit more.