A modern CF card and adaptor costs less than 10% of what I paid for that 260MB drive, and offers perhaps 40x the storage – but still, how do you solve the short-sightedness of 1980s developers who didn’t plan for this and supply a hard drive installer? This is where WHDLoad steps in. With the rapidly falling cost of mass storage, and the relative rarity of working Amiga floppy drives, this needed to change. In fact many Amiga games used a non-DOS disk format to perhaps squeeze a few extra bytes on, or provide copy protection, and if you pop one of these in to your Workbench environment all you’ll see is DF0:NDOS and no way to launch the game. Later in the Amiga’s life, games sometimes came with a hard drive installer when they were supplied with many disks (and in fact it was the purchase of Beneath a Steel Sky, on 15 floppies, that prompted me to purchase a 260MB drive for my A1200 the very next day to try and save myself from disk-swapping injury) but this is an exception rather than a rule. If you’ve not heard of it before, WHDLoad is a fantastic piece of software which streamlines the loading of games from an Amiga equipped with a hard drive.

Download beneath a steel sky amiga