Got problems with new A1200 Purchase.

[demolition]

Besides setting the gfx to OCS/ECS, disabling CPU cache is also very useful if trying to run older software.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by demolition

Besides setting the gfx to OCS/ECS, disabling CPU cache is also very useful if trying to run older software.

yeah that's what I was trying to say

[TomCrazy]

@Trydowave
Here, maybe this can help you:
[ Show youtube player ]

Also, I'm wondering about the scratch that can be seen close to R512 in this photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/6788377...ream/lightbox/

Is that just a piece of hair, or is it a scratch on the motherboard? If it's a scratch, I wonder if it's deep enough to go through the traces on the motherboard...?
It would be a pretty easy thing to fix for someone who is used to doing these kind of repairs, but if there actually is a break on one of these traces, it might explain why you're having certain problems with your motherboard. I don't feel like backtracking these traces on my motherboard right now since it will take some time to do so, so I'm not sure at the moment which signals are going through these traces. What kind of symptom your Amiga will show because of a break in these traces will depend on what signals are going through them.

Could you check your motherboard to see whether this is just a piece of hair from some fabric or if this is actually a scratch in the PCB? If it's a scratch, how deep is it? Could you check it with a magnifying glass?

In any case, what I would start with is to try to hook up a shugart drive to the motherboard and see how that works, since the one you have is obviously not a shugart drive.

Originally Posted by trydowave

I just loaded X copy on an external (using the boot manager) and it loads but all the gfx are crashed.

This is perfectly normal. You have to go into the early boot menu by holding both mouth buttons at startup, and then click on "Display Options..." and choose "Original" instead of the default setting of "Best Available".
Click "use" and then start XCopyPro. The graphics will no longer be corrupted.

[ElectroBlaster]

Trying to help ID that disk drive and I believe it is a variant of the Sony MPF:

Dell 02D067 - GX400
Sony MPF920-F

This was then modified to work on the Amiga, hence the eject button mod.
If I am right then that gives you a headstart on how and which mod method was used.

[TomCrazy]

@ElectroBlaster
I have the very same drive at home and yep, I can confirm that it's a PC drive that has been slightly modified to work on Amiga. However, the way it's modified at factory (or the retailers?) makes it work only with Escom motherboards that has not been floppy fixed. The drive will not work with Commodore motherboards without futher modification.
I could explain about exactly how the drive is configured signal-wise, but there is no point since it's never going to work well with trackloaded games anyway.

The drive doesn't have the ready signal on the controller IC, which is what makes it very difficult to have it work with trackloaded games. You have to design and build a whole new external circuit for that and hook it up to the floppy drive to make it work.

Since the original poster has a Commodore rev 1A motherboard, the right thing to do would be to hook up a shugart drive to that motherboard since he seems to be interested in getting trackloaded games working as well.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by ElectroBlaster

Trying to help ID that disk drive and I believe it is a variant of the Sony MPF:

Dell 02D067 - GX400
Sony MPF920-F

This was then modified to work on the Amiga, hence the eject button mod.
If I am right then that gives you a headstart on how and which mod method was used.

I used to use a modified Sony MPF920 in one of my Big Box Amiga's, it worked great but sadly I never tested any old games, my big box Amiga's are all too beastly to even consider inserting an A500 Game into

When you get your A600 definitely try the drive from that

[trydowave]

Thanks for all the responses. Ill take the thing apart again abnd have a look at the motherboard to see if it is a scratch or a hair. Im not really bothered about the A500 games as I intend to go the WHDload route anyway. I jsut wanted to boot floppies in workbench and maybe play the odd game (had no idea none of them would boot up).
My 2mb A600 i'll reserve as my dedicated ECS machine. My A500s can go into storage

TomCrazy: Thanks for going through all that trouble and making a video I'll give it a watch as soon as I get back from work.

Dow do I disable CPU cache btw? Is it in that boot manager tool?

Thanks
Tony

P.s. Just out of interest. Roughly, how many older games are compatible with the A1200? In Winuae when I choose my A1200 config I can boot almost any OCS/ECS game? But maybe that doesnt count.

[TomCrazy]

Yes, you disable the CPU cache in the early startup menu. I'm sure you will find it quickly if you have a look around in the menu. It's hard to miss it.

Before trying to load old games, you should always turn off the CPU cache and set the display options to "original" for the highest chance of getting the game to load. If it still doesn't work, you could try with relokick as a last attempt before giving up the thought of running it from an AGA based Amiga.

It's very difficult to estimate how many old games work on an A1200, but I will try to make a very rough estimation according to my experiences.

50% - not working at all even with relokick
25% - working if booted with disabled CPU cache and graphic options set to "original", or if booted with relokick. However, the game has got graphic glitches or other bugs.
20% - As the 25% category, but without the glitches and bugs. The game runs fine.
5% - The game works fine without glitches even without setting the display options to "original" or using relokick. Only a few old games will work this well from floppy without doing anything else like using relokick.

But again, these numbers are only a very rough estimation and should probably not be taken that seriously.

[trydowave]

To start off. Since you kindly did a Video for me I thought i'd make one too so you could see my A1200 going bannanas

[ Show youtube player ]

Originally Posted by TomCrazy

@Trydowave
Here, maybe this can help you:
[ Show youtube player ]

Also, I'm wondering about the scratch that can be seen close to R512 in this photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67883777@N02/9441453377/in/photostream/lightbox/

Is that just a piece of hair, or is it a scratch on the motherboard? If it's a scratch, I wonder if it's deep enough to go through the traces on the motherboard...?
It would be a pretty easy thing to fix for someone who is used to doing these kind of repairs, but if there actually is a break on one of these traces, it might explain why you're having certain problems with your motherboard. I don't feel like backtracking these traces on my motherboard right now since it will take some time to do so, so I'm not sure at the moment which signals are going through these traces. What kind of symptom your Amiga will show because of a break in these traces will depend on what signals are going through them.

Could you check your motherboard to see whether this is just a piece of hair from some fabric or if this is actually a scratch in the PCB? If it's a scratch, how deep is it? Could you check it with a magnifying glass?

In any case, what I would start with is to try to hook up a shugart drive to the motherboard and see how that works, since the one you have is obviously not a shugart drive.



This is perfectly normal. You have to go into the early boot menu by holding both mouth buttons at startup, and then click on "Display Options..." and choose "Original" instead of the default setting of "Best Available".
Click "use" and then start XCopyPro. The graphics will no longer be corrupted.

Thanks a lot for that Video TomCrazy, really appreciate it. It was very informative. (and I know how long it takes to create vids, edit them, add subs etc Like you said. I hope someone else apart from me finds it useful too.
As soon as the A600 is back ill rip the drive out of it and shove it in the A1200. I'm going through testing the games now in OCS mode and disabling cpu. Still not having much luck though . As for the scratch , or hair, I'll take a close look when I take the A1200 apart again and post some more pics.

Originally Posted by TomCrazy

Yes, you disable the CPU cache in the early startup menu. I'm sure you will find it quickly if you have a look around in the menu. It's hard to miss it.

Before trying to load old games, you should always turn off the CPU cache and set the display options to "original" for the highest chance of getting the game to load. If it still doesn't work, you could try with relokick as a last attempt before giving up the thought of running it from an AGA based Amiga.

It's very difficult to estimate how many old games work on an A1200, but I will try to make a very rough estimation according to my experiences.

50% - not working at all even with relokick
25% - working if booted with disabled CPU cache and graphic options set to "original", or if booted with relokick. However, the game has got graphic glitches or other bugs.
20% - As the 25% category, but without the glitches and bugs. The game runs fine.
5% - The game works fine without glitches even without setting the display options to "original" or using relokick. Only a few old games will work this well from floppy without doing anything else like using relokick.

But again, these numbers are only a very rough estimation and should probably not be taken that seriously.

I'm quite amazed at these rough percentages. Well, nowadays we have Whdload so not to worry.

On another note. All I need is an accelerator. Do you recommend the aca 1232 accelerator with 128mb ram from the likes of Amigakit? IS it a good card? I basically want it for Whdload, OS3.9 and some basic internet use (I mean really basic, like grabbing files from aminet). Will it work with my motherboard Rev? Or would you recommend a faster Apollo? Do accelerators need cooling?

Will it give me all the ram I need?

Im adding to that list, a new floppy drive and ks 3.1 roms. Hopefully this is all ill need to get the A1200 up and running and half decent.

Any other advice would be great though.

Thanx again mate.

[trydowave]

Hi. Just thought i'd post this video as a follow up:

[ Show youtube player ]

I put the my A500 drive into the A1200 and it loaded Apidya first time no problems. Didn't even have to adjust settings on boot. I will try more games later. I now believe that this crappy pc drive is the only offending item.

Question to TomCrazy. Do you still want me to check the back of the mb for that scratch/hair? Or do you think it's safe to assume that its only the floppy causing the issues.

Thanks
Tony

[FOL]

Originally Posted by trydowave

Hi. Just thought i'd post this video as a follow up:

[ Show youtube player ]

I put the my A500 drive into the A1200 and it loaded Apidya first time no problems. Didn't even have to adjust settings on boot. I will try more games later. I now believe that this crappy pc drive is the only offending item.

Question to TomCrazy. Do you still want me to check the back of the mb for that scratch/hair? Or do you think it's safe to assume that its only the floppy causing the issues.

Thanks
Tony

Try some more disks, as it definitely sounds like a drive issue.
Drives we sell, work fine. Haven't come across a disk it doesn't read yet.
Works exactly like the original, I have one in my own A1200.

[trydowave]

I was looking on your site. there definitely affordable enough but when i read closer it says it has a green led? The one that came with my A1200 had this and it was a modified pc drive! TomCrazy says I should get a Shugart. still doing my research.
Whats the difference between yours and a shugart?

Cheers
Tony

[demolition]

AmigaKit drives are also modified PC drives, but they have been modified correctly and they are 100% compatible with Amiga so it will work just as well as your A500 drive.

[trydowave]

The seller said he got it from Vesalia. As far as I know they ship the same drive as amigakit. Dosent this mean that it wont work? Or maybe the drive got damaged somehow when it was sent?

[Lord Aga]

Don't worry, I have an Amigakit's drive in my A600 and it works like a charm

[prowler]

...and I have fitted a recently purchased one in my Commodore A1200 where it has proved to be 100% compatible.

[TomCrazy]

Originally Posted by TomCrazy

... it's a PC drive that has been slightly modified to work on Amiga. However, the way it's modified at factory (or the retailers?) makes it work only with Escom motherboards that has not been floppy fixed. The drive will not work with Commodore motherboards without futher modification.

I would like to correct myself here. It was a while since I tested this disk drive on my A1200, but when thinking it through I realized that this is not entirely correct.

"Escom" PC drives are configured to work with Escom motherboards. If you hook up an Escom floppy drive to an A1200 motherboard, it will still work. However, it will be having some problems due to how the signals are routed. Some modified PC drives have a wire going between pin 2 and 34 on the floppy connector, which makes the change disk signal to be routed into both into the change disk and ready pin on the Amiga.
What this basically means is this:

1. The PC drive will work fine only when the ready signal is not needed. This goes for Workbench and other DOS programs.

2. Hooking up an external drive while the internal PC drive is connected will make the external drive not work properly. This is because the external drive then cannot generate the ready signal properly since the PC drive is is trying to counteract that signal with a steady high or steady low state, depending on whether the disk is inserted or not in DF0.
This completely interrupts the wired-AND connection between the internal and external floppy drives and will make programs that require the ready signal not work at all, even on the external floppy drives.
This problem does not occur on Escom motherboards since there is a break on the Escom board between pin 34 of the internal floppy connector and the floppy control circuitry.

Originally Posted by trydowave

Hi. Just thought i'd post this video as a follow up:

[ Show youtube player ]

I put the my A500 drive into the A1200 and it loaded Apidya first time no problems. Didn't even have to adjust settings on boot. I will try more games later. I now believe that this crappy pc drive is the only offending item.

Question to TomCrazy. Do you still want me to check the back of the mb for that scratch/hair? Or do you think it's safe to assume that its only the floppy causing the issues.

Thanks
Tony

It's great to see you got it working with the A500 drive, although it wasn't much of a surprise to me. It wasn't difficult to figure out what was going on when I saw the pictures of your motherboard and your PC floppy drive.

I think it looks like a scratch on the motherboard judging by the pictures but nah... You don't have to check it since it's obvious now that it was the floppy drive that was causing problems.

It's a good thing Apidya worked without even having to change any settings in the early boot menu, but keep in mind that there are many games that will not work without changing these settings. And some games will only work with relokick, and some won't work at all unless you boot them on a genuine A500.
In such a case, you don't have to be worried that your floppy drive is at fault. As long as several games work with the shugart drive that didn't work at all with the PC drive, it's safe to assume that the shugart drive is working as it should.

Originally Posted by FOL

Drives we sell, work fine. Haven't come across a disk it doesn't read yet.
Works exactly like the original, I have one in my own A1200.

Are they genuine shugart drives in the sense of having the ready signal on board? Are they DD drives or HD drives? Do they come with a LED in the front (the internal A1200 ones)?
It says on the site that they are brand new. I'm wondering where you get them from? I thought there wasn't even one company left on this planet that are still manufacturing floppy disk drives, especially shugart ones...? What brand are they?

Originally Posted by trydowave

I was looking on your site. there definitely affordable enough but when i read closer it says it has a green led? The one that came with my A1200 had this and it was a modified pc drive!

I think you were looking at this floppy:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=106
This one has a LED, but that is because it's an internal drive for use in bigbox Amigas (A2000, A3000, A4000 etc).
When I was talking about floppy drives not having a LED on the front, I was talking about floppy drives for Amigas like A500, A600 and the A1200 which doesn't need a LED on the floppy unit itself since there is a floppy LED on the shell. If the floppy has a LED on the front anyway, it indicates that this floppy drive is not made to be specifically used with A500, A600 or A1200, but rather with any one of the bigbox Amigas or a PC.
If there is no front cover on the floppy and there is no LED, that means it's made to be used with any Amiga that is not of a big-box type.
If you want a floppy drive that not only electrically fits your A1200, but also physically fits well in the case, then you should try to find one that is designed to be used with A1200. And, like I said, the ones that are do not have a LED on the front.
Of course, some big-box Amiga drives with LED might fit electrically with your Amiga 1200, but they might not fit physically which can be a problem.

This is the floppy drive you should be looking at.
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=294
I don't know if it's a genuine shugart drive with the ready signal on board, but I assume it is since people in this thread have written that it works great for them on their Amigas. So I think you'd be quite safe to buy one of those, although I personally haven't tried one of them on my Amiga.

Originally Posted by trydowave

Whats the difference between yours and a shugart?

Probably none. I'm not part of Amigakit, so I think it's best if the staff of Amigakit tells us whether their drive is a genuine shugart drive or not. But if it has all the signals that a shugart drive has, and all those signals are routed correctly, and if the gain in the amp stage of the floppy drive is set to a level that works well with DD floppy media (PC drives with HD floppys use a different gain), and if all other signal levels and timing are in compliance with the shugart interface standard, then it is a shugart drive to 100%.

If you get a PC floppy drive that has the ready signal on board and has been modified to work with Amigas, then it will be shugart compatible, although I wouldn't like to call that a 100% genuine shugart drive in such a case.

Originally Posted by trydowave

TomCrazy says I should get a Shugart. still doing my research.

Ok, let me rephrase that. You don't necessarily need to get a shugart drive, but you should at least get a shugart compatible drive.
In either way, it should work without any problems regardless whether you get a 100% genuine shugart drive or a shugart compatible PC drive.
...Unless you happen to put in a game disk with a totally weird track loading routine like Pinball Dreams for example, which will work only on a 100% genuine shugart drive and not on a PC drive, even if the PC drive is supposed to be shugart compatible. I have been doing some research but haven't managed to find out what is causing this. But nevertheless, that is not much to worry about since it's only like 1 game out of 200 or probably even less that has such a weird and mysterious trackloader.

But in conclusion, if you want the floppy drive to work with every game without any hardware limitation, then you should get a true shugart drive that was manufactured for use with the A1200 in the first place.
But this is of course only if you care about those 0.1% (or less) of the games that doesn't work with shugart compatible PC drives.

Originally Posted by trydowave

The seller said he got it from Vesalia. As far as I know they ship the same drive as amigakit. Dosent this mean that it wont work? Or maybe the drive got damaged somehow when it was sent?

I took a look at the vesalia homepage but there was no picture of the A1200 floppy drive, it only says EUR 22.90 in the listing which makes it difficult to tell if they are the same.
Do you know if Amigakit and Vesalia are using the same supplyer of floppy drives?

[trydowave]

Originally Posted by TomCrazy

I took a look at the vesalia homepage but there was no picture of the A1200 floppy drive, it only says EUR 22.90 in the listing which makes it difficult to tell if they are the same.
Do you know if Amigakit and Vesalia are using the same supplyer of floppy drives?

Amigakit got back to me and they say that they stock different drives to Vesalia.