How to keep ARIV in memory when booting a game?

[MethodGit]

Particularly an NDOS game at that.

Would've thought entering "reset" after running ARIV would've done the trick (the docs state that it's "reset-resistant" after all), but apparently that just takes it out of the memory again (RMB does nothing).

Is there another command I'm unaware of? Said docs didn't really divulge much in the way of listings.

[Codetapper]

Is there any reason you are using the AR cart anyway over WinUAE's built-in debugger? The software ARIV cart on a real Amiga isn't reliable at surviving in memory compared with emulation.

[MethodGit]

I was looking at the Trolls AGA tutorial on Flashtro and it simply mentions this:

Start ARIV and boot copy of game.

How though exactly? The reset command obviously isn't the way of doing it.

[MethodGit]

Actually, it's as simple as Ctrl+Amiga+Amiga isn't it? At least doing that will make the ARIV title card pop up again at startup.

[MethodGit]

Godammit, has anyone managed to make Trolls AGA co-operate well with ARIV? It always plays up as soon as it acknowledges disk 2 at the disk-swap point. According to Flashtro it's supposed to just carry on to the title screen but nothing I try is working.

I've tried looking at AR1200/HRTMon (both are essentially the same), but have been left frustrated by the more limited and/or totally different functions it provides compared to AR. Not to mention that it keeps saying - no matter what I type - "illegal address". Even for addresses that are clearly in memory!

I just want to try something different with the game compared to what the tutorial suggests you do, since I managed to achieve something by my own mind with the ECS version and wanted to do the same with this one.

ARIV also doesn't like Shadow Fighter AGA. Or is that the other way round? Either way that game always resets during bootup and removes ARIV from memory.

[Galahad/FLT]

Have you got fast ram set? If you have then there is a bug in ARIV, where if the game is run in real fast memory on an AGA machine, some monitor commands don't display properly if the base address of the game you're running is too high.

Simple way to know is when the game is running and you can get the ARIV to activate, type 'r' to display registers, and if the PC (Program Counter) register shows greater than $200000 then it when you try to to type 'D' to disassemble ,you'll note that the address it tells you is different to the PC address.

With HRTMon you MUST put a $ sign in front of the memory address you are trying to access. Action Replay sensibly just assumes you want to view/disassemble/assemble memory in hexadecimal, HRTMon does not.

Its very irritating if you're used to Action Replay as I am and keep forgetting to put the $ in front

[MethodGit]

No fast memory involved. I just use the basic A1200 setup with 2Mb Chip RAM. When I try to access the second half of Trolls AGA (as in when it detects the second disk), it'll either stick on a black screen, shoot WinUAE's resources to full pelt to the extent that the window is unuseable and I have to force-terminate it, or it'll produce a weird purple screen after a few seconds and shoot WinUAE's internal CPU usage to 99% (or at least what the yellow LED light states). I could try the Aminet equivalent of ARIV - Aktion Replay Pro - except that it seemingly isn't setup to activate via RMB and even after reading the accompanying documentation I'm still none the wiser as to how you setup an activate key for it.

And thanks for the suggestion of adding $ in HRTMon, though I was pretty sure I was using it at the time I experienced problems, but maybe it's just my mind going at times.

[Codetapper]

As posted in another thread, why don't you use the WinUAE debugger Shift-F12 which will definitely stop at any breakpoint?

[MethodGit]

Good point. Didn't think there was a seperate debugger as well as HRTMon. Might come in handy with other games at some point.