I've been out of the loop for a while so is WHDLoad still being produced / able to register or has it gone freeware ?
Do you even need WHDLoad in the CF-card era for gaming or can you just download and run from CF?
Is there new custom solutions?
You can use a CF as a hard drive, but it will only work for games that support hard drive installs on their own, or through WHDload. You can still download it, and Im sure you can still register it too.
it is my understanding that there is no way whatsoever to get CF to work on the Amiga 500 Plus. Is this correct?
Never say never, but to my knowledge no. It requires a PCMCIA slot (for the external option, which is generally whats used for file transfers
My next question is that Amiga 1200s are pretty expensive to buy these days, would an Amiga 600 handle CF card gaming as well?
Between a 600 and a 1200 (stock) you are probably only looking at a hundred bucks difference, with a bit of patience.
You can do it on a 600 though, just fine.
If I am to retire my beloved Amiga 500 Plus, I would prefer the 600 to the 1200 for purely for the cool factor and would maybe look at kitting it out a bit more. I also found that the Amiga 600 is much more compatible with the classic games I enjoy to play.
I must say, I never found kickstart 2.x to be more compatible than 3.x really.
Once you factor in relokick or other options, very little will fail to run on a 1200.
And finally... is PCMCIA a simpler solution in terms of removing the case to access the IDE port?
I'd imagine modern PCMCIA cards are still compatible with the A600 and A1200?
I use a simple adapter I got from amigakit, but you can probably use other stuff too.
The main purpose of an external CF is transferring files (by way of a simple card reader on your PC) so you can write them to floppy.
Theres ways of mounting disk images virtually but I don't have any experience with those.
THe 1200 will take CF cards with an IDE adapter as an internal hard drive. I believe you can do that with a 600 as well, but hopefully someone can pitch in and illuminate.
With a 600, you'll probably want to look into adding some extra RAM, or loading from a hard drive will make life difficult. Same goes for a stock 1200 and AGA games.