Hi All,
I've finally pulled the trigger on getting an Amiga after wanting one for many years. Back in the early 90s, I was the proud owner of a C64C but was always a bit jealous of a few of my friends who had Amiga 500 machines (one even had an Atari ST
). We played SWOS, Kick Off 2, Rainbow Islands and many more for countless hours, however I never actually owned one. Instead of upgrading to an Amiga, my parents bought us a 486 dx2 PC which I used to play a lot of the Amiga ports like Worms etc.
Fast forward 25 odd years and I find myself still wanting one, however I'm very much into the Arcade scene and own 6 machine in varying degrees of functionality. So most of my tinkering time gets taken up with them.
At the moment though, we are in the middle of a house move and my machines are going to stay in storage for a while, so what better time to grab an Amiga to play with.
So what have I bought? I managed to get a boxed Cartoon Classics Amiga 500 Plus with tank mouse and all the accessories (no games though), for a pretty good price on eBay.
The machine is really clean inside, which is surprising because the original battery was still in place. I've snipped that out so there is no chance of battery acid eating up the board.
I've also bought an RGB to Scart cable and a Gotek floppy emulator from Amiga Kit.
The disk drive works ok, but I hardly have any discs to mess around withs I've installed the Gotek in its place temporarily (without harming the Amiga I may add) so I can try out some software.
I'm new to the many configurations of the Amiga but I've learnt quite a bit in the last few weeks, however I have a few questions that someone maybe able to answer for me:
1. I've noticed that there used to be a product on Amiga kit that allowed you to soft switch/auto switch between two kick start roms when resetting the Amiga with Ctrl+Amiga+Amiga combination of buttons. However, this no longer seems to be available. Is there anyone that sells a similar product to this? I would like to switch between v1.3 and v2.0 Kickstart roms.
2. I have a physical copy and Gog.com copy of Swos 96/97 for the PC, however I wanted to get a version for the Amiga as I hear that the gameplay is slightly better and has slightly better/different ball physics. eBay prices for the game are pretty extortionate so I thought as I own the game already (twice) I'd grab an ADF of the game (HFUK/Heat crack). I've got it to run on the Gotek, but one thing that is bugging me is that the crowd chants are always the same, over and over again. I've verified that by running the ADF on WinUAE and the same thing happens. Could this be a bad dump of the game? I'm struggling to find a good copy of this and I really don't want to pay eBay prices for a game I own twice already on a different platform. Is there anywhere I can get a good copy of this?
3. I was giving the Kick Off 2 Enhanced adf a try on my 500 plus, however it doesn't load correctly (it gets stuck on the Kick Off 2 splash screen). It is the same on WinUAE withKickstart 2.0 but if I set it to 1.3 it loads ok. Does Kick Off 2 enhanced only work with 1.3 or again is this a bad dump?
4. I can't remember how we managed back in the 90s, but is there a way for the mouse to be plugged in at the same time as two joysticks, or do you have to swap the player 2 joystick with the mouse each time you want a 2 player game. Or is there a modern adapter with a switch?
Apologies for the long post, but I'm pretty new to the Amiga scene and I'm trying to learn as much as I can
