Problems with a few games on my a500 and a1000

[skforty]

Hi all, new member here, but long time amiga user.


I resurrected my a500 recently, it has 512k trapdoor, and 4MB of ram on my gvp500. I use a kickstart switcher to go between 1.3 and 3.1.
I have it hooked up through RGB on my 1084s. Lately ive been making some floppies again and having trouble with a few games.



Flashback - Gets passed the exploder initialized and screen goes black waiting for copy protection screen but it never comes...just stays black screen.

Lemmings 2 - Shows the intro animation and when i click my mouse button, it SHOULD go to the psygnosis screen that asks for disk 2, but instead it goes black screen after i click mouse.


Here are some things ive tried all attempts have ended with the same results:

- Tried booting on my other 1.3 a500 with 1MB ram no peripherals attached.

-Tried booting on 2 different a1000 with 1.3 and 1.2.

-Tried 6 different flashback DISK ones from Gamearchives.

-Tried installing flashback to hard drive.

-Tried all of the above in 1.3 and 3.1

Here is the weird thing, using amiga explorer I dumped my EXACT 3.1 rom, and i pulled out my scsi hard drive from my gvp and hooked it up to my PC. I set the WINUAE config to match my a500 EXACTLY. I boot into winuae from my real gvp HD, and im able to play the game no problem. Also the floppies load from emu with same config.

I started thinking, maybe its a pal/ntsc thing. I tried using a pal/ntsc software switcher called "degrader" with no luck.

If im hooked up RGB, it shouldnt matter if my system is NTSC but the game is PAL right? Or is it more than just video output? Does it change timings of the clock speed?

Anyway, im lost...

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for the time looking, I appreciate it

[coze]

it may very well be a PAL/NTSC thing.

I'm a PAL user in NTSC land, and long before I learned the lesson to dump all my NTSC amigas and switch to PAL. Much less headaches that way ... sorry I know this doesn't help you but I can think of anything else ...

have you tried running the games on NTSC in WinUAE ? (just to confirm)

[skforty]

Thanks for the reply! I havent yet, thats a great suggestion, thanks.

I wonder why the software switcher didnt help...maybe its just flakey. Checking with gamefaqs, i see that flashback and lemmings 2 were only released in EU, so its looking more and more like pal issue. Is there a tool to convert ADF from pal to ntsc that you know about? Or does this big headache go away as soon as i put a pal/ntsc hardware switch in?

[coze]

AFAIK software switchers just affect the video output frequency. if the game is dependant on clock frequency there's nothing that can fix it short of a whdload fix.

I had too much problems like these (I'm in japan) I have an A3000 with a PAL/NTSC switch (you can switch between PAL/NTSC with a motherboard jumper) many games and demos require this switch to be on PAL no matter what you do. Even some whdload demos (the hardwired comes to mind) will not work if it's not on PAL.

[skforty]

i see, well thanks for the info, ill try putting in a pal/ntsc switch tonight when i get home and post the results. Thanks!

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by skforty

Hi all, new member here, but long time amiga user.

Welcome to EAB skforty

Originally Posted by skforty

-Tried 6 different flashback DISK ones from Gamearchives.

This part of your post caught my eye. It won't help you solve your problem but once you have then you might as well use the following... I've uploaded a 100% tested "English" (non traslated) version of Flashback to The Zone! for you. See this thread if you want more details: Fixing Flashback versions.. Ongoing..

To get access to The Zone! follow these instructions: How do I get access to the zone?

[skforty]

@DamienD: Thanks for the welcome, and thanks for the disks! I just grabbed em!

So heres an update;

Today i picked up about 20 scsi drives for 15 bucks i got (10) 4.5 GB and the rest are 9.1 GB and 18.2.

The hard drive i had in there at first was a 52 MB quantum lps. :S

I started off the night, installing, partitioning, and setting up WB 3.1 on my new 4.5 GB hard drive. That went well. Then i installed a hardware switch on my a500...no luck, and it didnt look like it was switching between 60 and 50 hz...so then i found more info about the different agnus chips...even though my a500 was a rev 5, it had the OLD agnus (8372)... Interestingly enough, its easy to tell if you have an old without opening it if you have ks3.0+ roms and hold both mouse buttons at boot...if its the old 512k agnus, "Display Options" will be greyed out. So then i opened up my other a500 and it saw that it did have the newer agnus (8372A). Lucky me. So after doing a swap and rewiring the agnus, i booted up and right away i could tell by the flicker it was in 50hz. I tried it the other way and it was 60hz. Booting into the boot menu confirmed this, selecting "Display options" and seeing it default to "pal" or "ntsc". I tried flashback, no more blackscreen, went right to the copy protection screen. Same results with lemmings2. So...its all good!! Thanks for all the help, i think im set...For now

Also, here is a pic of where i installed the switch.

Oh and @Coze - I confirmed it doesnt load in NTSC in WINUAE, good call!



*i only went into so much detail, because when i search for amiga info its posts like these that help me piece together information*