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Amiga 1200 problem launching games


ianoid

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Hey,

 

I have an Amiga 1200 (bought it on the forums years back). I believe it’s PAL but I have it running VGA out NTSC:High Res through an OSSC to a VGA LCD (an older Acer 4:3). I believe a while back I changed the settings to make it output NTSC, if that’s possible. I didn’t do any hardware mods to it.  It looks gorgeous in the workbench with this setup.

 

When I try to run any games on floppy, the screen goes black and the OSSC gets confused and can’t figure out the resolution, blinking between multiple resolutions. Black screen. I’ve tried setting ScreenMode to  Low Res as well as DBLNTSC High Res, which does not help.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to set it up so that it will output most games to VGA, or preferably all games that work on a 1200?

 

I’m pretty much an Amiga noob. I’ve used a 500 but that’s in storage. 

 

Thanks. 

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1 hour ago, ianoid said:

I’ve tried setting ScreenMode to  Low Res as well as DBLNTSC High Res, which does not help.

Where are you making this setting?

 

1 hour ago, ianoid said:

When I try to run any games on floppy

Are you booting to the floppies or launching them from Workbench?

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7 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Where are you making this setting?

 

Are you booting to the floppies or launching them from Workbench?

 

System->Preferences->Screenmode in the workbench the computer boots to.

 

Something I need to try is to boot a different workbench version from disk. I have to dig a little to see if I have some of those disks, or write one using Applesauce if it allows. 

 

When I try to boot game disks, it always goes to workbench. Is there a key combo to get the Amiga to just boot from disk?

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, ianoid said:

When I try to boot game disks, it always goes to workbench. Is there a key combo to get the Amiga to just boot from disk?

Booting from disk should normally be priority over the hard drive.  Unless the disk is not bootable, or the boot priority of the partition is set lower than that of the disk.

 

Also note, the screen mode you set in Workbench has no relevance to booted disks.  This is something where using WHDLoad would help.  You can, for the most part, change the screen mode in the pre-boot or startup menu, accessed by holding both mouse buttons as the computer starts up.

 

What version of Workbench are you using?

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Workbench came on the CF card that is hooked up inside the computer as a hard disk and it's 40.42, Kickstart 40.48. 

 

I used two mouse button on boot to change resolution from best available to enhanced and more games will start. Sadly it was a time of off disk copy protection and I don't have manuals handy. So no Pirates for me. 

 

Some still won't start. 

 

I started down the WHDLOAD (frankly I don't completely understand what it is) path several years ago with the internal CF card and then dropped the project as it appeared complex and I got busy with other stuff. I think I also didn't want to mess up a known good CF card. I'm hoping now to do the same with the external card port on the 1200. I don't have a windows computer set up so I'd like to find an Amiga hard drive image I can write to a CF card rather than set one up  using windows, an Amiga emulator and WHDLOAD or however the work flow goes. At worst I can run Parallels but I'd prefer to just get a ready made image to write. 

 

This unit is set to boot to hard drive/Workbench. When I go to the boot menu it doesn't let me change boot priority, only disable/enable. Some disks do boot though, although others refuse despite having no accessible files. 

 

Thanks for your help. 

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WHDLoad is not as difficult as it seems.  Simply put, you install the WHDLoad package, then you use an installer for each game you want. They require original disks (most of them, anyway,) so you would either need the original floppies or an IPF capture and an appropriate floppy emulator.  (You can also download pre-made WHDLoad packages, but I do not advocate for doing so.)  Of course, the bare-minimum for this endeavor is a way to extract the packages.  They are usually archived with lha or lzx, for each of which a shell command-line extraction utility is available from AmiNet.

 

You cannot change the boot priority in the startup, though, as you note, you can disable boot devices so see if that helps.  You must use HDToolBox to change the priority.  Did you happen to note down what the boot priorities are?

 

Also bear in mind that not all game floppies are accessible from AmigaOS.  You will often see them displayed in Workbench as NDOS disks.  These do not have a proper AmigaDOS formatting, but contain data that the boot-loader on the disk can access.

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At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious - how many of these games are you sure run on a 1200, regardless of any OSSC issues?

 

I've been downloading some games, old favorites and some I've never heard of, from planetemu.  ADF files then loaded onto an HxC.  With a PAL1200, my success rate is exactly 50%.  Of 88 games tested, only 44 have worked without any issues.  A few more sort of work.  The rest is a mishmash of blank screens, red screen, frozen screen, invalid instruction errors, random reboots etc etc etc.

 

I have now put the 1200 aside and have a 500 on the bench, and with guidance from @OLD CS1 it has 1MB of Chip RAM, Kickstart 1.3 and a physical NTSC/PAL boot switch.  So far the games that failed on the 1200 are working on the 500.  But only just started so time will tell.

 

 

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2 hours ago, oracle_jedi said:

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious - how many of these games are you sure run on a 1200, regardless of any OSSC issues?

Actually, a good point which can be over-looked: non-AGA games, or games which do not explicitly say they will run on the 1200, will likely not run on the 1200.  Not because of the AGA chipset, but rather due to incompatibilities with the 1200's Kickstart version or the CPU.

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18 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Actually, a good point which can be over-looked: non-AGA games, or games which do not explicitly say they will run on the 1200, will likely not run on the 1200.  Not because of the AGA chipset, but rather due to incompatibilities with the 1200's Kickstart version or the CPU.

Rest assured that there is no point related to Amiga so simple that it is not worth pointing out to me. Consider me a noob. I've really only worked to boot games, and mostly in the past on a 500, which was relatively straightforward. I did recap this 1200, so there's that.

 

With the ravenous community out there, there must be a list of compatible games for the 1200. I'll look into it.

 

And I won't give up hoping someone has a disk image I can write to a CF card without sorting it all myself. I take no pleasure in setting these flash cards up I need for all of my systems, especially when they are not simply writing files to a FAT volume.

 

Thank you for your help!

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@ianoid  The 1200 is a nice system.  I understand that about setting up CF cards over and over, and I concur that someone out there will have ready-made drive images for you.

 

I admit I am a little spoiled with my systems.  While all of them have HD floppy drives, which makes it easy enough to move stuff around as needed, with the exception of the A500s, all of them also have USB and SCSI.  Between floppies, USB flash drives, CD-ROM, and Zip drives, I have everything set.  If dial-up Internet was more prevalent, Internet on the Amiga would be a trivial task.

 

Even with all this modern utility, I have still on occasion worked to start a system up fresh using just floppies.  That is a chore, for sure.  Zip drives are better if you have a SCSI Amiga, or CD-ROMs.

 

In any case, I do sometimes over-look the simple things, like the 1200 compatibility with older games.  I have to remind myself at times, even in my day-job.  Glad you got some forward momentum, and glad I could be of some help.

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