Agony (PC) Amiga

Agony is a horizontally scrolling shooter with a surreal fantasy background. It was released by Psygnosis in Feb 1992 for the Amiga. The game was developed by Art & Magic, who were originally known as Ordilogic Systems. Agony was the only Amiga game developed under the Art & Magic name, as after Agony was released, Art & Magic started developing arcade games exclusively. Agony features a barn owl flying its way through six worlds filled with monsters. The owl uses various waves of echolocation which the player fires at the enemies.

According to the manual backstory, the sun-wizard master Acanthopsis discovers the "Cosmic Power" with a toll on his life. Before dying he teaches it to his disciples, Alestes and Mentor. Alestes has been transformed into a barn owl and has to pass through Mentor's traps and monsters in order to reach the Cosmic Power.

The main character owl in this game is actually the mascot character of the developer Psygnosis. The main theme was composed by Tim Wright (aka CoLD SToRAGE) who went on to compose the music for WipEout and WipEout 2097 (the Saturn and PC versions). This game was later made freeware in 2010 by the artist of the game (Franck Sauer) sharing the files for it on his personal website.

This game is pretty awesome. Like a shmup where the character is a magic owl that can use spells and levitate floating swords? That's rad as hell! I'd say sign me tf up, but this game is pretty dang hard.

I've included several versions of this: the pure copy .ipf files of the USA and Europe versions, the Europe version .adf file cracked by the group Crystal, and WHDLoad packs of the USA and Europe versions.

The difference between .ipf (Interchangeable Preservation Format) and .adf (Amiga Disk File) is that .ipf files are perfect copies of the floppy disks that include all the data plus what makes up the copy protection and the .adf files are imperfect copies that have mainly just the game data and don't have the copy protection data. Meaning that .adf versions had to be cracked in order to get past the copy protection. There are also several bad copies of .adf floppies that have bugs and bad code in them. So true to the name the .ipf ones are best for preservation and archival (unless the game was one that didn't have any form of copy protection like indie games)

How to Run:

(Using RetroArch with PUAE)

1. Make sure you already have the Kickstart ROMs in your system directory (since the files are licensed by Cloanto they're technically illegal to share but you can find them in my WinUAE post on the repo)
2. If using the .adf files just load the zip archive as the content. If you use the disks individually, you'll have to swap them through Disc Control when prompted
3. If using the .ipf files copy the capsimg.dll from the archive to the RetroArch system folder since that plugin is required to run them. Then just load the disks like you would do for the .adf files (maybe unzip and rezip the files first with the .dll taken out tho)
4. There really isn't much difference from the PAL or NTSC versions and both of them seem to still use the PAL refresh rate.

You can use FS-UAE to play the floppy versions too just as good. I've not had much luck getting it to work good with WinUAE. For some reason in the floppy versions the gameplay is messed up and shots hardly do any damage, and the WHDLoad version doesn't work at all through Workbench with iGame and just crashes the system. The WHDLoad versions work fine in FS-UAE if you have everything set up for it. So basically, maybe it's just WinUAE v6.0.3 but don't use it for this game.