GameBase Amiga - Illustrated Post-Setup Guide

Note: This is just the text displayed by the setup program after copying files. It has been enriched with screenshots for better understanding.

GameBase Amiga is now installed, you have two options to load it.

1) Start GameBase and GB Amiga will start automatically or if you have other databases installed it will show up in the list of databases

2) If you created a GameBase Amiga start menu folder then you can start GameBase from there, this option will load GameBase Amiga automatically, whether you have other GameBase databases installed or not.

Once you have run GameBase and the GameBase Amiga Collection database has loaded, a box will appear listing some of the useful WinUAE keys and asking if you wish to setup your emulators with the Gemus Setup Wizard, make sure this option is ticked and click OK. The wizard box will then appear and you should carry out the following steps

1) Click the Start button

2) The Pick A System prompt will appear, this will list the Commodore Amiga, so click Next.

3) Browse to the path you want GameBase to search for WinUAE, it's recommended you browse directly to the WinUAE path as searching could potentially take quite some time. Then click Next.

4) Once GameBase has finished searching it will show a list of the supported WinUAE versions and whether they have been found, and also their default joystick configuration. This is very important as you need to specify what you will be using for joystick emulation, either

a) WinUAE (Joystick) A standard PC joystick/gamepad

b) WinUAE Keyboard A) PC Keyboard emulates the joystick. (Numeric keypad, 0 and 5 = fire)

c) WinUAE Keyboard B) PC Keyboard emulates the joystick. (Cursor keys, right CTRL and ALT = fire)

d) WinUAE Keyboard C) PC Keyboard emulates the joystick. (T=up B=down F=left H=right and Left ALT = fire)

e) WinUAE X-Arcade Left) Use your X-Arcade joystick. (Left side of X-Arcade joystick)

f) WinUAE Keyboard Right) Use your X-Arcade joystick. (Right side of X-Arcade joystick)

For whatever version of WinUAE is detected, all 6 of the above choices will be ticked, simply untick the ones you won't be using (this can always be changed later). When you are happy with your choices click finish.

(please note that although only public WinUAE builds of v1.1 or greater are officially supported, you can tell it to use other WinUAE versions. Simply pick the emulator and joystick option you want from the list, click select file and browse to your WinUAE.exe

5) You will need to do the following before you can use the database: -

- Make sure WinUAE is setup (if you didn't already do it as GameBase loaded), if you for some reason cancelled the wizard or something went wrong, simply go to the menu and choose GEMUS > Emulator Setup Wizard

- Setup your options (Tools > Options)

- Setup your paths (Tools > Paths). Games you will have to find yourself, although it's highly likely someone (not the GB Amiga team) will end up putting the Games on eMule or some other p2p network. Other files like the Screenshots, music and extras can be found at http://gbamiga.elowar.com It's recommended you keep these files outside of the GameBase or GameBase Amiga directory, but you can put the directory for them anywhere you like, but each type of file should go in it's own subfolder eg. C:\GBAmiga Files\Games C:\GBAmiga Files\Screenshots C:\GBAmiga Files\Music C:\GBAmiga Files\Extras

- Tell GameBase which files you have (Tools > Verify Available Files).

6) Games will be played using the first emulator listed in the menu > GEMUS, so if it says WinUAE Joystick then WinUAE will expect you to be using a real joystick, if it says Keyboard B it will expect keyboard layout B etc. If you go to the menu > GEMUS and click manage emulators you can delete unwanted choices or rearrange the order. GameBase will always use the first listed emulator option as the default. However if you generally use a joystick but prefer keyboard layout b for a particular game then instead of clicking on play game you can right click on play game and choose which emulator option to use to load the game.

7) Pictures and text files are loaded with whatever your associated windows program for these extensions are. So it's recommended you have pictures associated with a lightweight program such as ACDSee or Irfanview and not a heavyweight program like PSP or Photoshop and .txt should be associated with a program like notepad rather than Word. For Music support you need to install DeliPlayer which can be downloaded from http://www.deliplayer.com/ It's recommended you download v2.50 public beta 1

Only supported games and kickstarts will be recognised and these must have certain names and must be in certain locations. To do this ClrMamePro and RomCenter dats will be supplied with instructions on how to use them. These dats can be downloaded from http://gbamiga.elowar.com

That's it! If you have problems, you can either ask at the EAB forums located at http://eab.abime.net or join the IRC channel which can be found at server: irc.abime.net channel: #MAGE

Have fun!