Hardware and/or Software problems

So, I've been trying to play games by transferring adf images to my A2000 HD and then using tracktool to put them on a disk, and boot them with my A1200. Several issues;

First, I would like to be able to boot games on my A2000, but it's DH0: is broken (reads every disk as "DH0: BAD"), and I can't seem to convince it to boot from anything else but the HD. I think I have Kickstart 1.3 in it - the early boot menu gives me options for different speeds and "AMIX" (never figured that one out) but no boot options. Maybe there's a way to convince it to treat an external drive as DH0?

Second, I'm not sure that the disks are writing correctly, or maybe my A1200 has issues, or perhaps I have extremely bad luck with the ADF images I found. Almost every game I try to boot on the A1200 after doing this, it reads the disk for a while, the screen turns a different shade of black, and then it just stops. No software failure messages, no crash, just stops. It sits and idles.

Now, I'm not inclined to think that the app is bad, or that my serial-cable transfers are bad, or all my disks are bad, or anything like that, because it works on occasion. Any non-NDOS game I try, like BattleChess for example, seems to work fine, and will run on the A2000 as well since I don't have to boot from it. I have also had exactly one NDOS game boot successfully on my A1200, so I don't think it's the system either. What does this leave?

I suppose it's possible that most of my ADFs are bad, but I find it unlikely. Because of where my various computers are located and other factors, I have to download them onto my XP machine, copy them to a flash drive, take them to my Win98 machine, then serial-cable them over to the Amiga HD, then image the floppy. But I still think that this shouldn't be a problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
GamerCoon

[cosmicfrog]

hi and welcome to eab

not much help from me but floppy disks are called df0: df1: ectra
and hard disks generally called dh0: dh1:
now I`m sure you have a A2000 but are you sure as just googled AMIX and took me here
http://amigaunix.com/tiki-index.php?page=Hardware

[Jope]

The A2000 030 board supports Amix.

[cosmicfrog]

so whats this early boot menu thing with speeds then ?

[Jope]

That's the 030 board's menu.

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showha...cgi?HARDID=165

[cosmicfrog]

Cool, thanks for the info jope

now my next question for GamerCoon is how dose he/you know what ks and workbench you using

Originally Posted by cosmicfrog

hi and welcome to eab

not much help from me but floppy disks are called df0: df1: ectra
and hard disks generally called dh0: dh1:
now I`m sure you have a A2000 but are you sure as just googled AMIX and took me here
http://amigaunix.com/tiki-index.php?page=Hardware

Ah, yes. I know how the drives are labelled, but it was late when I typed this :P

Anyway, my DF0: is broken. I guess I'm less sure about the hardware than I should be, it was my Dad's before me and he did modify it a fair amount. He ran a BBS back in the day, and I was like 7 at the time. At some point he had a bridge board in there, and there's still a PC floppy drive in the case, though it's not connected internally..he might have mentioned putting in an A3000 motherboard.. but the case is still an A2000

Selecting "version" from the workbench menu tells me I have kickstart 34.5, which I believe is a revision of KS 1.3. I know that I'm running workbench 1.3 because that's what I installed, though this was a few years back and I have since misplaced one of the disks. I think I still have all my WB 2.04 disks. My A1200 has WB 2.04 installed.

If it helps anyone figure out what I have, my early boot menu gives me the options: AmigaDOS on 68000, AmigaDOS on 68020, and AMIX.

Thanks for the welcome, and the quick replies!
-GamerCoon

[Shadowfire]

68020? You have the equivalent of an "A2500 UX" box, which is to say, an Amiga 2000 with the A2620 accelerator board, not the A2630.

I can say with 100% certainty that there is not an A3000 motherboard in your machine. The A3000 has different back panel ports, and the A3000's joystick/keyboard connectors are on the right side of the machine, not the front.

Of course, the next question I have, is how old are the disks you are dumping to? Back in the '80's and '90's I bought a TON of disks from MEI (they were cheap) and every single one of them is now bad. So before you write off that your disk drive is bad, try it with some newer floppies! You can use HD disks in your DD drives.

Now, you are going to experience incredibly poor game compatibility if you boot up in 68020 mode. 95% of all those floppy games barf on advanced processors. I recommend (once you get the floppy disk issue sorted out) holding down both mouse buttons and choosing "boot from 68000" when attempting to run a game off of a floppy disk.

Ah, thanks for the info! Yes, my ports are on the front. I will definitely keep the 68000 compatibility in mind, when I get to the point that I can boot from floppies in that system.

While I have been using floppies that I originally got in the late 80s/early 90s, they seem to still work okay. I've got probably 500 or so, and the vast majority of them will boot and run fine on my A1200. So I've taken disks that have good data, backed them up, and tried writing to them. If I write the images that were on them back to them, they seem to work again.

Oh yes, I should also mention - I had thought before that I had 1 NDOS ADF work correctly, but I was mistaken. For some reason I thought that It Came From the Desert was NDOS, but upon second look it is not. So thus far, all NDOS games have failed but the non-NDOS ones (I've only tried 2) have worked.

-GamerCoon