This tutorial will show you how to create your own LHA archives both on the Amiga and on the PC. As LHA is very popular on the Amiga this should be your prime choice of compression of your are distributing media that is specifically designed for the Amiga.

I hope this tutorial proves useful.

You will need the following to follow this tutorial:

• LHA (Amiga version)
• LHA (PC version)
• Workbench (any version)
• WinZIP (any version)

Once you have all of the above proceed to the guide.

Okay, here is how to make an LHA archive on the Amiga.

Start WinUAE and insert your Workbench ADF images, click the Hard Drives tab and check "add PC drives at startup", if you have it on a virtual hard drive then select the appropriate configuration. Click OK to start the emulation, once Workbench has loaded double click the Workbench disk and open the System folder now double click Shell or CLI (depending on your version of Workbench).

The following window should pop-up:

Now if you don't already have LHA on any of your Amiga disks you will need to download it from this site and transfer it to the C folder of your Workbench disk, for more information on transfering files click here. Of course if you can find a disk or ADF image containing LHA you can simply copy it from this disk to the C folder of your Workbench disk.

Once LHA is safely copied to the C folder of Workbench we can start the ball rolling. If your LHA archive is stored on your PC hard disk you will need to know the name of this drive in AmigaDOS. This is very easy to locate, if you have a single virtual hard drive installed through your WinUAE configuration then the chances are that your PC drive is DH1: - if you have two virtual hard drives installed then your PC drive becomes DH2: if you do not have a virual hard drive then it becomes DH0: and so on.

Obviously if your LHA archive is stored on a floppy disk or ADF archive you can access it by entering the drive name, e.g DF0:

For the purpose of this tutorial, our LHA archive "ale.lha" will be stored in a folder named Archives on DH1: and will contain the ALE-INTRO file located on our Workbench disk, we would type the following into the AmigaShell window:

• DH1:
• Archives
• LHA A ale.lha SYS:ALE-INTRO

The following should appear in the AmigaShell window, indicating that the file has been added to the ale.lha

To add another file to the archive we would simply repeat the above and replace the SYS:ALE-INTRO section with the name of our second file.

I don't want to do that, I want to compress a whole folder of files - no problem, if we wanted to all the files contained in a folder named temp to our ale.lha archive we would type:

• DH1:
• Archives
• LHA A ale.lha SYS:TEMP

How did we do it? again, this is pretty simple once you break things down. We wanted to create an archive named "ale.lha" and store it our archives folder so we changed over to the hard drive that contains this folder (DH1:) and then the folder named Archives, so we type Archives. PC users will be used to typing CD before the archive name but on the Amiga this isn't required, all you need to do is type the directory name followed by return.

The final step was to create the archive itself, we typed LHA (the program name) then A (telling the program to Add files) then ale.lha (the name of the archive we are creating) followed by SYS:ALE-INTRO (the name of the file to add) or SYS:TEMP (the name of the folder of files to add).

Congratulations, you just created your first LHA.

Now that you know how to create an LHA using your Amiga we will show you how to do it on your PC.

First of all make sure you have downloaded the PC version of LHA, copy this to your C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND folder so that you can access it from anywere in MS-DOS without the need for changing folders all the time.

For the purpose of this example we are going to create an archive named ale.lha containing a single text file named readme.txt and store it on the C:\ drive. In MS-DOS type:

• C:
• CD\
• LHA A ale.lha C:\README.TXT

LHA will say "Extension of archive (ale.lha) is not 'LZH' continue?" - press Y. LHA on the PC likes the extension .LZH but it is much easier to keep the extensions similar to the Amiga standard. Once you press Y the archive will be created and your screen will look similar to:

I don't want to do that, I want to compress a whole folder of files - no problem, if we wanted to all the files contained in a folder named temp to our ale.lha archive we would type:

• C:
• CD\
• LHA A ale.lha C:\TEMP

How did we do it? again, this is pretty simple once you break things down. We wanted to create an archive named "ale.lha" and store it on the C: drive without any directories, so we typed C: followed by CD\.

The final step was to create the archive itself, we typed LHA (the program name) then A (telling the program to Add files) then ale.lha (the name of the archive we are creating) followed by C:\README.TXT (the name of the file to add) or C:\TEMP (the name of the folder of files to add)

Congratulations you just created your first LHA archive on your PC.