New Game Pages and New Features

Hi, you may have noticed that new features have been added to oagd.net, especially during the last couple of weeks. The most recent major change is the new “game pages”, see for example Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and Paradise Lost. This is just the first version of game front pages, coinciding with the release of Paradise Lost. Not all new editing functionality is enabled for users yet. This is simply because not every detail is fleshed out yet – please be patient 🙂

We are also working on support for auto-downloading games (on demand) directly to FS-UAE Launcher – where possible.

The reason for these changes is that while the primary function of oagd.net was to serve as an online configuration database for FS-UAE Launcher (and other clients), the scope of the project grows, as we now also try to host game ourselves where possible – or link to legal download pages. People may now start to browse oagd.net without necessarily wanting to edit the online database.

We keep in mind that trying to do “everything” is not not always a good idea. The primary function of oagd.net was, and still is, to be a great resource for helping people to play games, either directly to human visitors, or indirectly when clients such as FS-UAE Launcher retrieves information from this site. It is not an encyclopedia, and it will not try to compete with e.g. HOL on the level of detail available about games. For this purpose, we link to HOL and Wikipedia instead 😉

It will probably help to have some kind of “mission statement” at some point. But in short, if something is useful to people playing Amiga games, and we can host or link to it, it should have a place on oagd.net in the future. I’ll follow up better later with more details and documentation regarding any changes 🙂

Rare Game “Paradise Lost” Now Available for Download

A previously unknown game (to most people), Paradise Lost, was intially sent to HOL by the developer Mert Börü with the request to include the game in HOL in April 2013. Mert included two releases of the game in his upload that the HOL team used to take the screenshots. One version was the original 4 disk release of the game and another one was included with a built-in unlimited energy trainer.

Mert Börü kindly gave permission to host both releases directly on OAGD.net, so everybody can experience this long lost Turkish game 🙂

Free Game Download Pages

We are in the process of adding and/or confirming variants available on pages with free downloads, so we can provide more information about which games are legally downloadable 🙂 This means that FS-UAE Launcher should recognize the disks from these sites. We hope that this information will allow people to get into Amiga emulation more easily.

To make sure the games have corresponding variants in the database, we need to check the downloads and confirm if the ADFs or IPFs are already available. If you want to help, please feel free to report the SHA-1 for the disks you found on those sites. It will speed up the process and help us a lot 🙂

We also hope you like the new look of the game pages.