New to Whdload what's The crack?

[spirantho]

Definitely WHDLoad is well worth the money.
For some reason my keyfile doesn't work with later versions and it just crashes instead of running the game - very annoying. I think Google managed to spider its way to my keyfile at one point and the WHDLoad guys thought I was distributing it (and I wasn't - that directory wasn't supposed to be publically accesible and I'm still angry that Google spidered its way through non-advertised private stuff).

Still worth every penny though (luckily the earlier WHDLoad still works just fine!) - just be careful about where you keep your keyfile (away from prying web companies)!

[spirantho]

What happened is this:
On my website I put the WHDload.key so I could get it onto one of my Amigas. It was just in my private webspace, nobody should have seen it.
However, Google (or someone like it) found my publicised website for the Catweasel or something, and cut off the "Catweasel/" bit. This brought it back into my main personal directory which should never have been accesible, but Verio (the hosters) had by default set it to create browse info when you looked at index.html! This meant it picked up all the contents of that directory, including my WHDLoad.key, and Google indexed it!
I had no idea about this till someone pointed out to me that my personal webspace was visible. This is why I now have an index.html there which just says "Go away, nosey!".

I think what irked me most, though, is that the WHDLoad guys could have bothered to email me - they had my address - and asked me why it was available. The fact that they just made future versions not work with my (legally paid for) registration key, with no warnings or anything, not even a notification - that was rather shady and undeserved. I paid for something for future updates and they crippled it with no warning - not good. If it weren't for the fact that the last working version runs everything anyway, I'd be complaining more loudly, though.

That said, it still really is an excellent piece of software, and I don't regret buying it at all - even though I can't use the newer versions through no fault of my own.

[spirantho]

I can see your point of view. But if WHDload hadn't had so much work put into it, the whole Amiga scene would have been massively deprived. Remember WHDload doesn't just install to HD. it also fixes most games to work on expanded systems.
It is a moral minefield as to the pricing and making profit from commercial games, but the benefits gained FAR outweigh the dubious nature of hacking the games in the first place. I'm all for protecting people's IP but in this case it doesn't cost anyone anything and allows us with pumped-up Miggies to still enjoy those games.

I'm right behind the WHDload guys in this one, and they deserve money for the amount of work they've put in which allows us to keep playing great Amiga games, even after the original disks have gone bad.It even lets us use our original disks on AmigaOS 4 machines (with a Catweasel )

[spirantho]

I think the work done for WinUAE is probably pretty similar to the work done for WHDLoad, to be honest. They both took a truckload of work. AmigaForever I'm not sure about, I don't know it well enough to comment, but WinUAE is the guts of it.

You need to remember that WHDLoad isn't just the program that you're paying for - it's all the different installs. Hacking into a game, removing the copy protection, fixing compatibility and putting in onto the HD is a lot of work for one game, and how many does WHDLoad do? Tons!

As usual it's horses for courses, though - some will find more use in AF, some (like myself) find more use in WHDLoad. I think either is well worth the cash, especially as it's a fairly small wodge of dough that's required to register WHDLoad given the work gone into it.

Buy both of them. In fact, register all that shareware you've been using for the last year thinking "I really ought to get round to registering that someday" - we nearly all have at least one piece of shareware like that!