A1200 WHDLoad Black Screen

[stylon]

So I fancied a game of Syndicate the other night, installed it but it wouldn't run. Hardly surprising I thought to myself given I was trying to run it on an expanded AGA machine. So then I thought, 'I'll try this new fangled WHDLoad system and make it think it's running on an old A500'. yeah it didn't quite pan out...

So I installed the latest WHDLoad, copied my Cloanto ROM's over and renamed them. Downloaded the installer for Syndicate and then installed that and my own 4 disks and ran the game. I got a nice little splash screen, some disk activity and then a black screen which required a reset to escape from.

Thinking it may just have been that game I installed another, Railroad Tycoon. Same thing - splash screen followed by BSOD.

I did a search on here and it was suggested this could be down to running in an interlaced screen mode, which I was. So I duly changed to a claustrophobic standard Pal High Res and tried again... with exactly the same result. I also tried adding the NOCACHE and NOMMU tooltypes which I read somewhere too.

Some info on my setup: A1200, Kickstart/WB 3.1.4, Blizzard 1230 Mk4 030/SCSI, 2MB Chip/128MB Fast. PCMCIA ethernet, SCSI CDROM/Zip drive. Games installed on DH2 partition on my CF card. There was over 1mb Chip RAM free when I tried to run it and when I ditched the Interlaced mode there was about 1.5Mb free.

Thanks as always for any assistance offered.

[npagonis73]

Hi there

When you say that you installed the game what do you mean? Is the version of the game you downloaded compatible with WHDload? Try the link below for the game you wanted. Just unpack it in your games folder. Then open that folder and click the games icon. Before that do the following:

WHDLoad uses 3 prefs files which are in S directory. Open the WHDLoad.prefs one and in there uncomment the NoAutoVec and ChipNoCache and also the QuitKey and change it to $59 (which is the F10 key to quit the game). Last make sure that you have no TCP/IP stack running.

https://www.whdownload.com/games/S/S..._v2.2_CD32.lha

Try to play now and let us know.

[stylon]

Thanks... Will try all that tonight.

To clarify, I installed the WHLoad program/script for Syndicate and then it prompted me for the 4 disks so I just inserted my original floppies at that point and I could see files being successfully copied across from them.

I'm a total beginner with WHDLoad I must confess.

[npagonis73]

The link i gave you has thousands of games ready for WHDload and the only thing they need is unpacking. If you download many of them, then you will need a frontend program to help you sort all those out and find them easy. That program is IGame or a very simple but nice one WHDloadMenu. The latter one is on Aminet.One thing at a time. First lets get the games to run.

[crazyc]

I had similar results when I set up my 3.1.4 cf card and forgot to setup the whdload startup and cleanup scripts as roadshow was connected.

[jotd]

yeah, you have to disable all network cards and stuff that can trigger hardware interrupts as whdload isn't going to handle them and it will crash

Also make sure you don't have a pirated whdload key somewhere (L:/S:/C.

[stylon]

Okay some great tips there. I've got the F10 key configured and the other two things set in the configuration. I now get a progress bar and a 'custom' tick box? When I load a game. No idea what that is for.

At this point I tried my copy of Syndicate and it still black screened.

Downloaded the CD32 one and it still black screened.

Saw the comments about networks - I have both Roadshow and Samba setup so I configured the startup to shut them both down and tried again.

Success this time, although the CD32 version did crash back to workbench a few times. When I first ran it it said the slave was out of date and prompted me to update it. I declined as I have no idea what a slave is... thinking I should have done it now but the option is no longer appearing to do so?

My version installed with floppies works until I try to start a mission and then crashes with error codes and asks if I want to do a core dump?

No pirate key - clean install of everything.

[crazyc]

I have an issue with my 3.1.4 setup where the whdload scripts stop roadshow successfully but fail to restart it after. I suspect that this is why you are not being told the slave is out of date (because you are disconnected and so its not checking)

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by stylon

I declined as I have no idea what a slave is...

The slave is the actual patch code which will be loaded by WHDLoad. It contains the necessary patches to let the game run from HD and other fixes that may be required to get a game running on all Amigas.

[jotd]

there's a "syndicateCD32.slave" in your installed directory. Grab the new one on www.whdload.de and copy the new one over the old one.

With that installation that should work. http://www.whdload.de/games/Syndicate.lha

[stylon]

Thanks again guys, spot on with the tip about Roadshow being awol after running a WHDLoad game.

Now I know about the slave - what's the procedure for updating one? When I click the update slave button it just gives me a link to where I had already downloaded the Syndicate installer (slave) from. When I run that installer it wants to delete the existing install and when I choose to skip that it then wants me to insert the CD which I obviously don't have?

[crazyc]

To update the slave you just generally download the new package, extract it all to ram (or wherever) but then just copy the new slave file into the game directory over the old one. So basically what jotd said in the post above yours.

[stylon]

Thanks chaps, looks like I was busy writing my post whilst JOTD was already answering my question. Have copied the slave across manually and all is good now.

Is it generally better to download a game and slave together rather than use your own copy of a game then?

[jotd]

if you install from your own floppies using the latest installer, that's the hard & best way.

If you download a whd pack and whdload tells that the slave is outdated, get the new one but check the history in the readme. Sometimes game needs reinstalling... in that case you're stuck with the old slave.

[stylon]

Gotcha. Thanks. Finally enjoying Syndicate now.

Will investigate iGame tomorrow night...

[stylon]

Originally Posted by npagonis73

The link i gave you has thousands of games ready for WHDload and the only thing they need is unpacking. If you download many of them, then you will need a frontend program to help you sort all those out and find them easy. That program is IGame or a very simple but nice one WHDloadMenu. The latter one is on Aminet.One thing at a time. First lets get the games to run.

I've got iGame up and running, even got a few game images for the handful of games I've installed. However every time I launch it I have to 'scan repositories' for my games to show up. Is that normal or have I missed something?

Also I don't seem to be able to select a genre for each game - all the games are stuck on 'unknown', oh and it doesn't seem to be tracking no. of times played even though I've enabled the 'savestatsonexit' tooltype. ...

[crazyc]

You should only have to scan repositories once, so it sounds like its not saving for some reason. Where are you running igame from?

[npagonis73]

Originally Posted by stylon

I've got iGame up and running, even got a few game images for the handful of games I've installed. However every time I launch it I have to 'scan repositories' for my games to show up. Is that normal or have I missed something?



Also I don't seem to be able to select a genre for each game - all the games are stuck on 'unknown', oh and it doesn't seem to be tracking no. of times played even though I've enabled the 'savestatsonexit' tooltype. ...

Hi there again. Glad you got it all working. Those last few issues are minor ones and here is how you go about it:

For the game repositories, make sure when you click Settings/Game Repositories and a window comes up, you click on the little folder right next to button "add". When you find the directory you need with yr games click "add" so it appears in the box below. This should make them stay and not dissappear. Now you can scan the repositories and should be there.

For the genre now you need to click on a game and highlight it. Then on the top menu right click on Game menu and then properties. Select yr genre and maybe favorite or hidden and click OK. Do this for the games you want and now it should work.

Let me know if that is what you needed.

[npagonis73]

Is the workbench installation yours or is it a distro? Maybe you have 2 igame installations and it's prefs are saved in the other one. Also you don't need to use tooltypes on IGame since it has preferences tab in its menu to set all your settings up. Also get it to scan for slaves and not folders from the above menu.

[stylon]

iGame is installed in my games partition [DH2:]. The workbench install is all mine, created from scratch with a clean 3.1.4 install.

Sounds like I've done everything correctly from what you described above. I even tried setting it to scan for slaves rather than directories just now. All my games were there when I closed it but after re-opening it all the games had gone and I had to re-scan again.

Likewise when I go to game properties I can see the genre menu that displays 'unknown' but when I click it - no other options appear for me to choose. Also I have played Syndicate half a dozen times now (launched from within iGame) and it's not registered that either.

I've attached a photo that I hope shows everything in one fell swoop.