FS-UAE 2.2.3 does not find kickstarts used with 2.0.1

[TheDarkCoder]

Hello,

I am inexperienced with FS-UAE, so I guess it's my fault.

I use FS-UAE on OS X Mountain Lion. I had 2.0.1 working nicely, with kickstarts taken from a rather old Amiga Forever CD and an A4000 working configuration using 2 hard drives.
I upgraded to 2.2.3 by brutally overwriting the 2.0.1 files with the 2.2.3 ones in the Application Folder.
But i didn't change the Folder in Documents which contains my kickstarts and configurations. From the launcher I did "Scan files and Configurations". But then, launching the A4000 configuration says that I miss the right kickstart for A4000.
I have a kick 3.0 image, and also a 3.1 one (the one coming in Amiga Forever, I don't know which version is exactly). I have also tried to set manually one of those kickstart from the "kickstat rom" tab in the launcher, but didn't work.

please help!

[FrodeSolheim]

Hi, I don't recall any effective change in what kickstart is recognized for A4000 between 2.0.x and 2.2.x. It requires a specific 3.1 kickstart, and amiga-os-310.rom from Amiga Forever should satisfy this requirement. If it does not work even when selecting the kickstart manually, perhaps rom.key is missing? (it should be in the same directory as the rom file).

Please attach FS-UAE.log.txt and Launcher.log.txt after having tried to run FS-UAE with the A4000/040 model (please quit both FS-UAE and FS-UAE Launcher before attaching log files).

I'm sure we will get it sorted out

[TheDarkCoder]

Thanks for your help! I apologize for probably stupid question, but I am really a newbe in Mac OS X and FS UAE.

The problem is that I don't have rom.key ...
As far as I understand it should be on the Cloanto CD, right? Even in old versions like mine?

But how is it possible that with 2.0.1 the emulation worked?

regards

PS: are you the main FS-UAE developer? Very good job, by the way!

[FrodeSolheim]

Originally Posted by TheDarkCoder

Thanks for your help! I apologize for probably stupid question, but I am really a newbe in Mac OS X and FS UAE.

The problem is that I don't have rom.key ...

Originally Posted by TheDarkCoder

As far as I understand it should be on the Cloanto CD, right? Even in old versions like mine?

Yes, you need a rom.key from the same source as your rom files (there are sometimes different rom.key files for different Amiga Forever versions, if I remember correctly). The rom.key file is likely found in the same folder on the CD as the one with the .rom files.

Originally Posted by TheDarkCoder

But how is it possible that with 2.0.1 the emulation worked?

In 2.0.x, the launcher looked at the file checksum to identify rom files, and it had a list of recognized checksums (including checksums for Cloanto's encrypted ROMs). In 2.2.x, the Launcher decrypts .rom files and identifies them by checksums after decryption. Since rom.key is not found, the ROMs cannot be decrypted and are therefore not recognized.

In 2.0, FS-UAE Launcher would then still recognize the encrypted ROM, but FS-UAE would not be able to load it, so most likely it "worked" because FS-UAE then used the internal AROS kickstart replacement ROM (you can force this internal ROM in FS-UAE Launcher if you want to).

Originally Posted by TheDarkCoder

PS: are you the main FS-UAE developer? Very good job, by the way!

Yes, and thank you

[TheDarkCoder]

Originally Posted by FrodeSolheim

Yes, you need a rom.key from the same source as your rom files (there are sometimes different rom.key files for different Amiga Forever versions, if I remember correctly). The rom.key file is likely found in the same folder on the CD as the one with the .rom files.



In 2.0.x, the launcher looked at the file checksum to identify rom files, and it had a list of recognized checksums (including checksums for Cloanto's encrypted ROMs). In 2.2.x, the Launcher decrypts .rom files and identifies them by checksums after decryption. Since rom.key is not found, the ROMs cannot be decrypted and are therefore not recognized.

In 2.0, FS-UAE Launcher would then still recognize the encrypted ROM, but FS-UAE would not be able to load it, so most likely it "worked" because FS-UAE then used the internal AROS kickstart replacement ROM (you can force this internal ROM in FS-UAE Launcher if you want to).



Yes, and thank you

thanks for your help. I don't think the explanation for 2.0 working is the right one, however. As you suggested, I just tried to launch the 2.2 with Internal ROM and my Workbench HDfile. It boots, but the graphics of AROS workbench is clearly different. That was not the case with the 2.0, it used exactly the same graphics of the 3.1 workbench.
Anyway, I'll try to recover the rom.key.
I also have the possibility to dump the roms of real Amigas (I have a nice Amiga collection). In that case, how should I proceed and how can I get a correct ROM.key ?

regards

[TCD]

If you use a kickstart image from a real Amiga, you don't need a rom.key The rom.key file is only needed for the kickstarts from AF.

[TheDarkCoder]

I have a theory. is it possible that in older versions of Amiga Forever, ROMs where not encrypted? I ask because my rome do not seem to be encrypted. System messages are clearly readable. In that case, is it possible that version 2.0 was able to use unencrypted AF roms while 2.2 is not?

I'll soon check if my AF CD has ROM.key or not

[TheDarkCoder]

No, my theory is wrong, but I think to have finally solved!

So I pick up my AF original CD (a personal gift from MCB) which is the rather old AF 5.0 (from 1998) and found the ROM.key. I did the import and now all seem to work.
What I did when I installed 2.0 probably was to copy kickstarts from my windoze laptop directly into the FS kickstart folder. It worked, but I now understand that the correct setup procedure is to use the import function.
For that to work you need to have kickstarts and rom.key in a separate directory (I unsuccessfully tried to put rom.key directly in the FS kickstart folder).

Any way, thanks for your help!

[FrodeSolheim]

It isn't necessary / "correct" to use the kickstart import function, one can just copy the ROM files manually to the Kickstarts folders. But the files are indexed in a file database by FS-UAE Launcher, so if the rom.key is not in the folder when FS-UAE Lancher indexes the files, the result will be cached, and adding rom.key will not cause FS-UAE Launcher to re-index the .rom file files (This is something which can be improved, so I might consider implementing a feature to re-index the .rom files if rom.key is added later).