Screen blanking issue

Hi All and thanks for allowing me into the forums


I have searched through but cant seem to find anyone with the same issue im having with my amiga 1200.


When ever the drive is being read the whole system seems to halt, I am running the whole thing from a CF card. I have uploaded a vid of it to poo tube any help would be greatly appreciated.


[ Show youtube player ]

[Daedalus]

Does this happen when running games from the hard drive / CF card using WHDLoad? It looks like you don't have enough memory to "pre-load" all the game data. If you have a RAM expansion, what is it? If it's working, you may need to enable the PRELOAD setting for WHDLoad. Otherwise, the game is interrupted by the patch as it redirects floppy accesses to the hard drive.

Thank you for your reply Daedalus, im not sure its the Amiga thats the issue now i emulated it on my pc using the compact flash card from my amiga and i am having the same problem. I have ordered another compact flash card to see if it solves the issue.

[Daedalus]

Yep, definitely sounds like your WHDLoad settings so. The CF card shouldn't have that sort of effect.

Have a look at the WHDLoad documentation. You can set global settings and per-game settings, and either one of these could have preload disabled, which will cause what you're seeing. Also, updating WHDLoad to the latest version might help.

Thanks Daedalus, I updated WHD load by copying the files on top of the old ones, still the same. I will look for these global settings later when I get in

Just looked and im ashamed to say it looks a bit beyond me lmfao, I used to be good on the amiga back in the day but like my brain, my skills have vacated me

[Daedalus]

Okay, well first thing to try is to pick a game where this happens. Then open the icon information window for the game. Then see if the Tooltypes section contains a line with PRELOAD in it. If not, or if it's anything other than just the word PRELOAD, add or edit it to just PRELOAD. Then try running the game by double-clicking the icon.

This will only work if you have enough RAM to load all the data before the game starts. 8MB of free fast RAM should be enough for almost every game.

This could be my issue, my A1200 looks bog standard apart from the cf card added. I'll look into getting a ram expansion. Any recommendations?

[Daedalus]

Ah yes, that would be it alright. confirm it first by trying it on your PC with the PRELOAD option, see if it solves the problem. I'm sure it will, and then you can look at RAM cards. There are a couple of options, none are particularly cheap unfortunately. Old RAM-only cards crop up for sale now and again. The ACA1221EC accelerator is a little more expensive but will give you the RAM and a small increase in CPU speed. And there are a couple of homebrew options emerging that give you 8MB of RAM.

ive ordered an 8mb ram upgrade from ebay for 89 quid, hopefully that will do the trick. What is the maximum size cf card I can use in the amiga, I have an 8gb one but would like to add more 'stuff' than that, also, when I partition the card is there a partition size limit I need to use?, I have looked into the transfer rates and am pretty sure I know how to change those

I am really enjoying re-learning all this and thanks again Daedalus for your continued expertise

[Daedalus]

8GB is probably enough to hold pretty much all the software released for the Amiga, other than complete ISOs of CD games, so you might not actually need more. It is possible to go to pretty much any size you want, but special considerations need to be made. You need a device driver and filesystem capable of reading large drives. OS 3.5, 3.9 and 3.1.4 include these, or they can be loaded from the hard drive at boot time. The safest option is to have your Workbench partition relatively small, within the first 4GB of the hard drive, and then that can be used to load the files needed to read the rest of the partitions on the drive. There are plenty of guides around for doing this, and several different ways of doing it. I would suggest taking an image of your existing card on a PC before you mess with it though, so you can always go back to it.

Sooo .. i have the card all sorted, I have added the 8mb ram upgrade to the trapdoor underneath and now the games are coming up "cannot allocate shadow memory" .. could this be a faulty ram upgrade board or am i doing something completely wrong (most likely scenario)

oh and the cf card runs perfectly in WINUAE on my pc.

sorted .. the ram card needed removing and reinserting a few times because of old connections, thanks for all your help.