Getting back into Amiga - What way to go?

[crazyc]

Congrats mate! Great progress !

[rabidgerry]

Thanks mate appreciated!!

I guess a re-cap is the next thing to look at. Going on holiday next week so it will have to wait.

Starting to think of other mods now!! This is infectious haha!

[crazyc]

Depends on what you are going to do with it. Things i have had done to some of mine include removing the rf module, running an extra power connector for fans off the psu socket, and reinforcing the power lines to the floppy power connector, but that was because I was running lots of power hungry stuff.
Enjoy you week off, I am just returning from mine

[rabidgerry]

Where were you mate? Heading to Czech Republic myself. Today I tried sticking XPS on there to allow myself the ability to load add files. Failed miserably lol. Remove the RF module? What you mean? Currently I'm working on creating my own 23pin female dsub connector so I can hook up that upscaler board. Question what does an upscaler do? My TV kind makes its all pre5y big so I dunno what this upsCaler will actually do. Make it less pixelated?

[crazyc]

Was in france for a week, but home now.
Assuming you dont use the rf modulater to connect to a tv, you can remove it and leave yourself space for something else depending on what mods you do. I dont have the specifics as I had the mods done when I got the board recapped, as I used the space for running power cables for a dvd drive out.
If your current setup works on your tv and you you only want it for games then really you dont need a scandoubler. One of my machines has an indy mk2 fitted which gives me a higher resolution workbench, but doesn't affect games resolution, but allows both to be output via dvi/hdmi to the TV.
Now I have towered that machine i will drop the indy back to my other a1200 i think, as it will run too hot in the tower and the workbench is taken care of by the voodoo graphics card.
It just means that when I switch to games I have to change input on the monitor.

[rabidgerry]

Well I don't use the RF out (the bit that old tv aerials used to connect with right?). I currently using a the composite output. It's not brilliant, it looks ok sometimes but kinda changes in circulation. Sometimes it gets a little brighter, sometimes it's not bad, sometimes it has a bit of ghosting. Obviously not so bad that I couldn't sit up all last night playing Wolfchild, but I'd rather it was better hence buying that little GBS 8220 board. It is/was usable but I want better clarity.

Not sure I would remove the RF modulator. Probably no need. I might get a real time clock though. I also found a pcmcia network card in work which I don't know if it would be much use for an amiga but this guy seems to use one.

https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm...Ethernet-card/

The driver disk in work was for pc so not sure if I could get that running or not.

[nogginthenog]

Does your TV have SCART? You get a much better picture with a SCART lead.
https://amigakit.amiga.store/product...roducts_id=226

I don't have a RTC in my A4000. But I do have ethernet so I just get the time from an internet time server at each boot.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

Does your TV have SCART? You get a much better picture with a SCART lead.
https://amigakit.amiga.store/product...roducts_id=226

I don't have a RTC in my A4000. But I do have ethernet so I just get the time from an internet time server at each boot.

Yeah tv has a scart and I actually have that type of cable as well. I didn't notice any different when I used it a few weeks ago. I'll try it again though and see what I think.

[rabidgerry]

Managed to bust one of the drives yesterday and basically tried to reinstall from scratch after wiping the CF card on windows again and for some reason wasn't able to. However the second card I had managed to set up to the point where I actually partitioned on the Amiga then back to winuae for classic workbench, well I managed to finish that off properly and that worked a treat. Not sure how I broke the other one. Initially all I was trying to do was put some more games on it as the whdload I had on there only had like 500 games. So I literally tried to bring over one games and got a lot of bootblock errors and various things as I tried to save the game to the card. Then I started getting freezes and crashes in whd load and I reset a few times. More errors etc. So I wiped the card. Tried to start again but to no avail. Heading off today so won't be able to sort it out until I am back. I'm sure I can fix it.....unless the card is dead.

[Solo Kazuki]

Did You set proper max transfer on CF Card?

[rabidgerry]

Funny you should say that, the tutorial I watched said set max transfer rate as 0x001fe00 and it for some reason kept adding an extra 0 in there after clicking out of then back in to check it again so it would end up with 0x0001fe00. Where as the other video and different tutorial have the max transfer rate as 0x1fe00. So I dunno if that is what was causing the issues or not. The odd transfer rate tutorial was for SfS. The other tutorials were for pfs3.

[daxb]

You can ignore leading zeros. They are ignored. Similar to simple math like 0003 + 010 + 00001 = 14. 0x1fe00 0x01fe00 0x001fe00 0x0001fe00 is all the same.

0x1fe00
0x means that the following value is hexadecimal
  1fe00 = 130560 bytes in decimal

[rabidgerry]

Ahhh well that's ok then. I guess I bust the drive all by myself. As I mentioned I had errors trying to copy a game onto the drive and extract from rar file. And I had tried multiple ways and eventually I had to reset a couple of times due to freezes and error boxes that wouldn't close and then I decided I could start from scratch again and that's when I noticed I wasn't able to complete the exact same install method using that CF card.

[rabidgerry]

Haven't picked up where I've left off since last week. Decided I have one drive working using pfs3 so make the most of this and then go back and sort the other drive out.

So tried my hand at pcmcia to amiga hdd. Failed! Went on the existing amiga pcmcia thread about it.

Also failed at getting adf's to work on the amiga. I was really interested in getting this sorted because Back to the Future ptII has a big in whd load and doesn't work, so I figured I'd use my ADF version. Failed!

[crazyc]

How did you use the adf? Did you mount it or write it to floppy?

Haven't used adfs much as I do almost everything via whdload. What is wrong with the whdload version of that game?

[rabidgerry]

Oh it freezes after two minutes of the game. It's known problem with that game.

I tried to follow this for the ADF thing.

[rabidgerry]

[ Show youtube player ]

[crazyc]

Have you tried writing the adf to an actual floppy and playing that?

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Have you tried writing the adf to an actual floppy and playing that?

Well no I haven't tried that. I'm sure it would work. But the reason I don't want to do that that is I feel I need a viable solution to completely abandon the need for floppies. I have the onboard floppy drive and it is working fine and also an external one, but I don't want to rely on them.

In my search for direct adf loading I discovered adf_device. It played an adf without any issue. It mounted the adf I tried first to the desktop and then I was able to click on the icon and play. However when I tried it with BTTF2 (yes a crap game that I enjoyed for some reason ) it didn't work because that ADF is over 880kb for some reason.

Currently I have a cheapo no name 16gb card on the go (my second hdd), have the pcmcia slot working for file transfer and I have played around with using a cf-sd adapter into the pcmcia adapter and that also worked.

However just wondering from any WHD load users, is there a quicker way to have repositories scanned? Also is there any advisable size to what your game library should be? I have had to rescan mine a few times because all these weird extra names showed up in the game list and clicking on them will crash the program and it seems the way to avoid it is to rescan, which will then not show these extra name files with "alt alt alt alt" after the game title. It takes a long time to rescan and so far my game library is a-m of whd load game pack and "s". I have yet to add the rest of the letter from the library.

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

However just wondering from any WHD load users, is there a quicker way to have repositories scanned? Also is there any advisable size to what your game library should be? I have had to rescan mine a few times because all these weird extra names showed up in the game list and clicking on them will crash the program and it seems the way to avoid it is to rescan, which will then not show these extra name files with "alt alt alt alt" after the game title. It takes a long time to rescan and so far my game library is a-m of whdload game pack and "s". I have yet to add the rest of the letter from the library.

If your using iGame, to be honest id dump it, its to slow and clunky, there are other much more streamlined and faster game launchers.
As for myself I just browse the actual folders on my games drive and don't bother with a launcher at all.
I have around 2600 games, igame did scan ok but as u say takes ages, using a 68020 it's far to slow, and ok-ish on an 030, but i hated it from the start lol, if I was to use another launcher I would probably try tiny launcher or something.