When running on Windows XP and on newer versions of Windows, Amiga
CD-ROMs are accessed by the Workbench 3.X environment as they would be
accessed on original Amiga hardware, with no known compatibility issues.
This is because Amiga Forever includes a preinstalled Amiga CD file system,
which accesses the virtual SCSI CD-ROM drive provided
by the emulation software, even if the PC CD-ROM drive is not a SCSI
device.
On pre-XP versions of Windows, and on some non-Windows systems,
the emulation software may have to access Amiga CD-ROMs using CD file system
functionality provided by the host operating system, which is usually similar, but in most
cases not identical to the comparable functionality originally implemented
for use in the Amiga operating system.
One issue you may encounter is that the source of the files to be
installed is not "accepted" by the installation procedure. For example, some
Amiga programs were originally distributed on a CD-ROM with a given name,
and if you backed up these files to a hard disk directory it is not always
sufficient to "assign" the original CD-ROM volume name to the hard disk
directory. This may also happen when mounting CD-ROMs in some version of the
emulation software, for example if the CD-ROM volume name contains
characters which would work on some Amiga CD-ROM file systems, but which
are "illegal" by ISO-9660 or Windows standards.
The Amiga Installer program is sometimes too "intelligent". It can be
programmed to not consider "assigned" names, and to only look for
a volume or device name which matches the desired name, say, "Wordworth_7".
If the emulation environment did not automatically assign the proper volume
name there
are two alternatives to fix this problem:
- Temporarily assign the proper volume name using the manual configuration of WinUAE, and
then launch the emulation. The CD-ROM must be in the drive before
starting the emulation.
- Open the installer script, look for where it searches for the volume name (typically a
"getassign" command), and where you see the "v" or "dv"
flags in that line, append an "a" after the "v", which will tell the
installer to consider not only volume and device names, but also assigned names.
Then "assign" the desired volume name from the Shell (e.g. "Assign
Wordworth_7: WinCD:").
Another possible issue involves certain file name differences which exist
between the native Amiga file system and other file systems which the
Amiga can use, such as CD-ROM file systems, network file systems and the
directories on the host file system which can be
mounted in the Amiga emulation. This sometimes affects minor data files
which are not important for a software package to run, but which can cause
the entire installation to fail.
Because even under the emulation the RAM device always uses the native
Amiga file system, it is possible to use the RAM Disk as a source and/or
destination of installations to overcome some common issues.
In case of filing-system-related difficulties involving an installation
of software which was distributed in an Amiga archive such as LhA, these can
often be solved by extracting the archive to RAM, and installing the
software from there. If this is not enough, install the software itself to
RAM rather than to hard disk, then manually copy the directory to hard disk
and update the path information which the installer may have written to the
"S:user-startup" or "S:Startup-Sequence" files. This usually also solves
possible issues related to higher capacity hard disks, which older
installation programs were not designed to handle (e.g. resulting in
negative "free space" values).
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