This tutorial will show you how to unpack an LHA archive, these are similar to ZIP files and can be found on many FTP and Amiga sites around the internet. In this tutorial we will show you how to unpack and LHA archive on the Amiga and on the PC so get reading guys.

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 uncompress an LHA archive on the Amiga or via an Amiga emulator.

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" is stored on DH1: in a folder named Archives, we would type the following into the AmigaShell window:

• DH1:
• Archives
• LHA E -X ale.lha

The following should appear in the AmigaShell window, indicating that the file is now uncompressing:

When this is done you have uncompressed your LHA and it's ready to use.

How did we do it? well it's pretty simple, first we changed drives by typing DH1: - which could just as easily be DF0: or DH4: it works for all the drives attached to your PC/Amiga, then we changed directories to Archives. Now on a PC you are used to typing CD ARCHIVES - on the Amiga this is not required, all you need to do is type the directory name. Finally we uncompressed the archive by typing E (extract) -X (with directories) after the LHA command. Simple as that.

Of course there are many more advanced things you can do with LHA and we will probably cover these in the future, in the mean time type LHA followed by return to get a list of commands ... told you we could do a lot more.

Now that we have dealt with at least one way to uncompress an LHA on the Amiga (trust me there are more), we will now look at the easy way to do it via the PC.

First of all make sure you have downloaded the PC version of LHA, copy this to your Winzip folder in the Program Files directory of your C: drive. Now start Winzip and:

• Click the Options menu
• Select Configuration

The following window should pop-up:

Now:

• Click on the Program Locations tab
• Click the [...] button next to LHA on the right hand side
• Locate the LHA.EXE
• Press OK

You will probably need to close WinZip before it can handle LHA files. Locate your LHA archive and double click it, the following window should pop-up:

Make sure you check the "Always use this program to open this file" box and select Winzip32 from the list, now click the OK button and Winzip should now open with the contents of your LHA displayed:

All you need to do now is push the Extract button and select a location to uncompress to. Very simple indeedy.