Daedalus2097

Ha, oops, didn't realise this was a thread necro, so my previous post is mostly related to a 2-year-old post. Sorry, I totally missed this post the last time... This is interesting, because when those capacitors fail, they sometimes take the video hybrid with them. That can mean severely distorted, or totally blank video output. Beep codes would be nice, but that would have been additional cost for a machine that was intended to be as cheap as possible. Using the video output colour is a simple way of using the already existing hardware features to report a similar level of error. Using your oscilloscope, you might be able to tell what the R, G and B lines are doing, and thus determine the colour of the screen. But, as with beep tests on a PC, this will only give you a vague idea of the issue, not an exact diagnosis. This, of course, depends on the video hybrid being in working order. Fitting a DiagROM and using a null modem cable to get the output is indeed a good way of troubleshooting a mostly dead machine. It can run with a very minimum of working hardware, including no working chip RAM. For me, DiagROM is a step I go to once there's no obvious physical damage - replacing sockets (unless clearly damaged) is only something that happens when I've confirmed that they're causing an issue.

Any TV should be compatible with the 15kHz horizontal refresh rate - that's the standard rate for analogue SD video, so if the TV has that connection (composite, S-Video or SCART), then it does support 15kHz video. The vertical refresh rate and colour encoding are different stories, and sometimes provide their own stumbling blocks, though colour encoding isn't relevant for an RGB connection. It's displays intended for PC use that often don't support 15kHz video. Anyway, to go back a bit: it's great that you have it working now, but I wanted to clarify a couple of things regarding the caps lock key. A single flash of the LED is an indication that the keyboard started up normally - the troubleshooting quite quoted can often be misleading and refers to a repeating pattern of flashes, in this case a single flash every couple of seconds. If you can turn it on and off just fine, but only a few times and then it stops responding (as in your case), that's an indication of a fundamental issue on the motherboard, specifically interrupts not being serviced which usually means the CPU hasn't started. I suspect there was something else going on with the machine, and reseating the various chips at some point has rectified the problem.

Sorry, I meant to replicate a native Amiga drive. You can set up an 80-track 5.25" drive to essentially emulate a standard Amiga 3.5" drive, in which case no mountlist is needed and it works directly with the standard Amiga filesystems. You won't normally get an error when you edit and save the mountlist - it's when you actually mount it that it will give an error. For example, if you try to mount the same mountlist twice, it should give you a "Device PC2: already mounted" or something similar.

Nice That looks like it has the latch circuits needed, though if it's not showing up without a mountlist then it's not set up to act like a generic Amiga drive. What version of the OS are you using? If you try to mount the mountlist again, do you get an error?

There are a couple of different things to think about here. Is your custom drive trying to be a generic Amiga drive, or is it trying to be a 5.25" drive specifically like the one in that image? A generic drive needs to have special logic for latching the signals and providing a suitable device ID to the OS for it to be automatically recognised. Are you trying to mount it with the mountlists suggested in that thread? Do you have a model number for the mechanism?

Yeah, the lack of support at the top of the keyboard does mean it's fairly common to find they're warped, but even pressing down on the top of the RF shielding will show they offer very little in the way of support - if you're going to bend the 1mm steel plate at the back of the keyboard, you're going to bend the 0.1mm steel sheet of the shield. Indeed, 1.3 is the minimum for a self-booting setup. To use software like WHDLoad though for running non-installable games from the hard drive, you need at least 2.04, and if you're going to upgrade, you might as well go for 3.1 (or even 3.2).

If it's a floppy-only system, then there's not much of an advantage. It's mainly serious software and newer games that benefit from the newer OS, neither of which will work well (or at all) on a stock A500. If you were planning on expanding the system with some fast RAM and a hard drive solution, then upgrading the 3.1 would be a good idea.

It's not required to support the keyboard, and normally the keyboard shouldn't even touch the shielding. The keyboard is supported around 3 edges by the plastic case, and if it touches the shield it's probably warped in the middle from abuse. Besides, many (probably most) internal CPU expansions require the removal of the shield, and the keyboard sits just fine on such machines afterwards. Yeah, as has already been said, that sounds very much like there's an internal/external drive mod of some sort going on. Kickstarts prior to 2.0 will only boot from the internal drive (DF0:), so to boot from an external drive you need to trick the machine into thinking it's the internal drive. It's a common enough mod, and there are many guides for DIY mods as well as commercial plug-in solutions. But issues can occur when they're not working quite right - if you have a short between the _SEL0 and _SEL1 lines, you'll get both drives trying to respond. Since the Gotek doesn't need a Motor signal to respond, it may respond when it isn't really intended and you'll get contention between the two drives. This will result in the machine reading garbage and refusing to boot. Workbench 1.3 will boot on Kickstart 1.2, so that in itself isn't the reason it's not working.

There are a few ways to reduce the RAM requirements of OS 3.2, but realistically, if you're using a machine in any serious capacity that would warrant the use of 3.2, you should have at least a few extra MB of RAM. By far and away the largest requirement for RAM is validating FFS partitions after formatting, or interrupting a write. At the default settings, you need about 1MB of RAM per 1GB of partition, so if you don't meet that requirement and ever invalidate a partition e.g. because of a crash, you'll have trouble getting it to validate. Things to do to reduce RAM requirements: - Use a physical 3.2 ROM - Use the basic icons, backdrops and low-colour screenmodes - Use fewer buffers for each partition - And for the validation requirements, use a larger blocksize. An 8kB blocksize will only require 1MB per 16GB of partition space, as well as giving a significant boost to performance. 3.2 can and does run in 2MB of RAM, but as I said, you'll probably want more than that to do anything significant.

Yep, the clockport address space is mirrored across 4 ranges starting at $D80001, $D84001, $D88001 and $D8C001. A directly connected device normally sits at $D80001, but most drivers will check all 4 addresses, so they can be used with clockport splitters. The Solas board internally responds at $D8C001, which allows the lower three (including the original address) to be used for other clockport devices at the same time.

It's actually a rotary encoder for the Gotek, so you can easily scroll through the entries, selecting by pushing on the shaft. Works well, but with the keyboard shortcuts isn't really necessary. Adjusting the lighting is done through the software, which looks like this:

For most of the signals, you should be able to do a full continuity check between the contact on the Gotek / external floppy and the CIA. This will take the cable, connectors and everything else in between the two into account. Possibly too obvious, but have you checked that the 5V supply from the external port is making it to the Gotek? The two CIAs are identical, so you can troubleshoot by swapping them over and seeing if the problem moves elsewhere. The floppy functions largely correspond to the parallel port on the other CIA.

The RGB controller reads the audio output at a hardware level, so any sound from games or music players can be used to trigger animations without any software required. It doesn't have ARexx support just yet, but I'm working on it Currently it can react to audio, disk access or Shell commands aside from the main configuration program.

Ha yes, chrome FTW Yeah, the looks won't appeal to everyone, but the general practicality isn't affected - the Gotek can be controlled from the keyboard and has an on-screen overlay so there's no need to use the small screen and controls, and the RGB lighting is software controlled from Workbench, so can easily be turned off or toned down with a couple of clicks. The Re1200 motherboard does indeed have ROM switching built in - I added a small switch at the back of the case to select the ROM, and the SD card includes 3.1 and 3.2 OS installations.

Just finished this build for another member of the Scottish Amiga Users Group. It has a new white ReAmiga 1200 motherboard, a new A1200.net translucent case, a mini Gotek and custom bracket, with on-screen display and keyboard control, and a Solas board to provide the RGB lighting (as well as some other functions). Might not be to everyone's tastes, but it's quite the eye-catching machine. I'll be sorry to be passing this one back to its owner!

Welcome along! 1: A Gotek is enough to run games from floppy disk images, which is close to the experience you get from using real floppies and likely what you had back in the day. Adding a CF card or hard drive improves the experience dramatically because loading times are greatly reduced, and everything's accessible from Workbench without faffing with disk swaps and reboots. But it also introduces some other requirements, and some people prefer the floppy-only experience. You don't need to boot Workbench at all for most games when you run them from floppy / floppy image, and Workbench can be booted from floppy too. 2: Well, if you add a hard drive to the machine and want to run games from it, you'll need more RAM. Additionally, the A500 doesn't have an IDE port, so you'll need at least some RAM and an IDE adaptor. You might also need a Kickstart upgrade. You don't specifically need a TF536 for this, but a TF536 gives you the RAM, the IDE and a dramatic increase in CPU power too. Depending on the games you play, that increase in power might not make any difference, or it might make a huge difference to playability. 3: There's a lot to this question really. ADFs are images of standard geometry Amiga floppies. As far as the Amiga is concerned, using them with a Gotek is the same as using the actual floppy with a real floppy drive: the machine will typically boot from them, loading times will be the same, and disk swapping needs to be done for games that span multiple floppies. However, many original games use a custom disk format as a form of copy protection, and these can't be stored as ADFs. So you'll typically have to use ADFs that are based on cracked copies of games, which had their disk format converted to standard so they can be copied. Instead of ADFs, if you want to use original floppy images, the IPF format includes the extra information needed to emulate the non-standard format. I don't think a Gotek can use these images - they're more useful for emulators. WHDLoad is a very different thing. It's intended to patch original games so they can be used on expanded Amigas. This means they can be run directly from the hard drive, and also takes care of some other issues like incompatibility of games with later OS versions, CPUs or chipsets. It provides other fixes and options too, like a quit key to go back to Workbench without rebooting, support for 2-button and multi-button controllers, saving to hard drive, preloading games entirely into RAM to prevent any loading delays and so on. It only supports original floppies, so it won't work with most ADFs. It's easy to find archives of games that have already been installed from original floppies however, and can easily be transferred to the CF card from a PC, typically using WinUAE or another emulator. So, if you're using your Gotek and a flash drive with your ADFs on it, WHDLoad doesn't really offer you anything. If you've expanded your Amiga and have a hard drive and enough RAM, WHDLoad offers a great deal of convenience. I personally wouldn't be without WHDLoad, but as I said above, some people prefer the floppy-like experience, and expanding an Amiga isn't particularly cheap.

Yep, the pin layout on older A500 boards is slightly different. It's a fairly easy mod to do yourself if you're handy with a soldering iron, otherwise adaptors to take the standard ROM pinout and adapt it to the rev 5 layout are cheap and easy to find.

Yeah, that's a hefty price tag alright. As others have said, that's A1200 territory, which is a significant upgrade over the A500. It's an A500, so recapping is usually not required, unlike some of the later Amiga models. Don't worry about that aspect for now. Upgrading the ROMs can be useful, but it depends on what you want to do with it. If you just want to boot games from floppy, 1.2 is enough. If you want to add a hard drive, you'll probably need to update it to 1.3 at least. 3.1, 3.1.4 or 3.2 will give you a much more up-to-date experience, but you might fine reduced compatibility with older games run from floppy. Additionally, 3,1,4 and 3.2 pretty much require a hard drive, and while you can get around that, there's very little point because you'll miss out on almost all of the improvements. If you're adding a hard drive and updating to a more recent Kickstart for games, you'll also need a more significant RAM expansion than the basic 512K one that's often found in the trapdoors of these machines. 4MB is a reasonable minimum to be able to play games from hard drive via WHDLoad, and 8MB is more comfortable.

The Alien Breed series have good co-op modes, as does the Chaos Engine. I haven't played them on other platforms though so I don't know how they compare. Worms is on every platform under the sun of course, but Worms: Director's Cut is an Amiga exclusive, and the best version of the original Worms there is (some might say the best of all Worms versions). Banshee is excellent for co-op, but you've mentioned that already. Super Skidmarks supports 4 players, or up to 8 players with linked machines. They're not co-op, but Lemmings and Settlers both have split screen 2-player competitive modes, which I don't think was an option on other platforms.

Yeah, sounds very like Another World to me. A very atmospheric game, and the precursor to Flashback from the same developers, so in some ways has a similar fee.l.

Yeah, it can be done easily with assembly, which is how most games would have done it I guess, but any language with hardware access capability will be able to do it. I wrote my own CD32 reading routing in Blitz Basic for example. If you can peek and poke a couple of registers and do a bitshift, you can read a CD32 pad.

All Amigas can use the CD32 controller. The controller is only supported by the OS from 3.1 on, but most games read the controller by banging the hardware directly, and this will work fine regardless of the OS, even on an A1000.

There's no actual PPC support in 3.2, but you should be able to install the required libraries as before - OS 3.9 was the same deal, except it had the PPC libraries bundled on the CD. Copying stuff over from the 3.9 setup should be no problem either.

Yeah, some were distinctly homebrew in terms of quality and content later in the Amiga's life, but there are still a few worth checking out. The list posted are games I have myself and have played a fair bit. Bubble Heroes and Heretic 2 are pretty well regarded, though I haven't played them myself.

Yep, Wipeout 2097 was a big one, probably the most demanding of all since it absolutely required a PPC processor and a 3D graphics card, thought the original Wipeout wasn't released on the Amiga. To be fair, there were still commercial releases going on until early in the '00s, so I'm including some of them here: There were some other big notable ones though that are worth checking out, some ports from the PC like Wipeout, but others genuine Amiga original gems: - Descent: Freespace (PC port). Requires an 060 & 3D acceleration or PPC. - Earth 2140 (PC port). Requires an 040 (realistically an 060) or PPC and a graphics card. Expansion pack for the Mac also works for the Amiga version. - Shogo: MAD (PC port). Requires PPC and a graphics card. - Payback. Amiga original GTA clone. Requires an 040, but realistically an 060 and graphics card. The last Amiga game I bought in a bricks-and-mortar shop (an Amiga store in Berlin in 2000). Really excellent game with a great soundtrack, some nice gameplay and 4-player split screen versus mode. - Napalm. Amiga original RTS. In theory requires an 020 but realistically requires an 040 or 060 and graphics card. Steep difficulty curve but excellent game. - OnEscapee. Amiga original platformer inspired by Flashback. Requires AGA or a graphics card. - Exodus: The Last War. Amiga original RTS. Requires an 030 and AGA, realistically an 040 and graphics card. Gentler difficulty curve than Napalm and some nice ideas, but not quite as well polished. - T-Zero. Amiga original horizontal shoot-em-up. Requires AGA, squeezes a lot out of the machine for impressive results. And, of course, Quake 1 and 2 also got commercial releases before the open-source ports. Q1 requires an FPU and realistically an 060 and graphics card. Q2 requires a PPC, 64MB of RAM and realistically a graphics card. And there were others that didn't make themselves quite as memorable, but still, there was enough of a dedicated fanbase with souped-up Amigas to warrant commercial releases up to 2002 or so.