Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by paul1981

LCD's suffer from motion-blur full stop! Always amazes me when I fire up the superior CRT to actually see motion correctly in all it's in-focus fluid glory! All that I will say is 50Hz games obviously show it up more than 25Hz games, so maybe BC Kid is a 50Hz game?

Modern VDU's suck backside to me. Nor do I go to the cinema any more for much the same reasons...Crap contrast, image is blurry unless nothing moves, and the sound is about 50 times louder than it should be (maybe 500). It's really quite something isn't it when you can watch a film at home with better definition and sound than at the cinema (just when you thought I couldn't insult the cinema any more...I just did).

I don't go to the cinema anymore because the movies are shit and other people annoy the piss out of me due to their rudeness and bad manners.

Anyways.............so not everyone has a CRT, does this mean sub standard Amiga viewing on actual hardware then for the future? Aren't most people using LCD's?

Thanks for the answer btw, that is what I expected.

[Daedalus]

It depends on the LCD, and it depends on the CRT. I always remember the phosphor trails left by a bright object moving on a dark screen when my 1084S was my main monitor. The newer CRT I replaced it with didn't have those, but was intended for a higher refresh rate. And I have no perceptible motion blur or trails on the LCDs I use, though I do remember well cheap or early LCDs having them back in the day. As for the cinema, sounds like it's a pretty poor cinema to go to, you equate higher framerates on home TVs with higher definition, or else you have some sort of hypersensitivity to it. I have the opposite experience with such setups - watching a video at 50Hz is all well and good for live things, but for watching a movie it looks dreadful to me unless it's played at the intended cinematic framerate. Unfortunately, streaming / torrents etc. introduce another element, where panning is juddery and there is banding in very dark areas, both artefacts of overcompression. The only way to avoid such distracting interference with the video is to increase the bitrate, and that generally means watching on Blu-Ray or one of the higher quality digital TV channels.

[rabidgerry]

I've some other stupid Amiga questions:

So if I select NTSC mode at early start-up menu does the Amiga really send out 60hz? Reason I ask is because I never feel like it has actually changed anytime I've tried it. It just seems to reboot then go into 50hz.

If I change to NTSC mode then do all the games I play from then on display at 60hz?

Silly questions I know but this is the place for them.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

So if I select NTSC mode at early start-up menu does the Amiga really send out 60hz?

Yes, it does. Colour encoding does not change, though. This means even if you switch to NTSC, on the composite output you get colour encoded in PAL at 60 Hz.

You can switch the menu itself to 60 Hz and back by pressing the space bar.

Reason I ask is because I never feel like it has actually changed anytime I've tried it. It just seems to reboot then go into 50hz.

It depends. If you boot into Workbench and have a PAL screenmode saved in Prefs/ScreenMode, then the startup menu switches to 60 Hz and Workbench switches back to 50 Hz.

If I change to NTSC mode then do all the games I play from then on display at 60hz?

Same answer: it depends. If the game knows how to switch between PAL and NTSC it might switch to its preferred mode. Or reset the hardware to the hardware default. AFAIK the early startup menu only sets some fields in GfxBase. If the game does not care about the OS it might not respect what's set in GfxBase.

But normally, yes games should run in NTSC mode.

[dreadnought]

I've only done it on real Amiga 500 with ACA500+'s help, but yeah, it's 60 Hz all over once you throw the switch (well ,an option in the menu). How visible it is might vary from program to program, eg Workbench doesn't look much different except less flicker and thicker scanlines.

Games should appear more stretched vertically, though that will vary case by case. Same with whatever happens in-game, some games won't adapt to the difference nicely.

[Daedalus]

Whether games stretch to fill the screen or not will depend on the monitor, not the game. Some displays will detect the lower resolution and faster refresh rate and adjust themselves accordingly, others won't and will leave the blank area at the bottom.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Whether games stretch to fill the screen or not will depend on the monitor, not the game. Some displays will detect the lower resolution and faster refresh rate and adjust themselves accordingly, others won't and will leave the blank area at the bottom.

My point is that games' resolution seems to play the part and so results might vary on the same display. Eg DotC (PAL) is reasonably well centered, while Arkanoid (PAL) is unplayable, because the game is too stretched and you can't see the bottom.

[OmaOhneBH]

so CRT over LCD i would say

[Mas21]

Hi. All these years copy game's on my A500 with xcopy and see the icon's for extra drives. Can we connect second external drive (df2) on Amiga?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Mas21

Hi. All these years copy game's on my A500 with xcopy and see the icon's for extra drives. Can we connect second external drive (df2) on Amiga?

You can connect up to three external drives. I had two and some games actually use them.

[Mas21]

Originally Posted by TCD

You can connect up to three external drives. I had two and some games actually use them.

Thank you very much for info. This is very useful

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Mas21

Hi. All these years copy game's on my A500 with xcopy and see the icon's for extra drives. Can we connect second external drive (df2) on Amiga?

Actually external drives are DF1:, DF2: and DF3:, internal drive is named DF0: They connect in a chain into each other via pass-through conenctors in the back of each drive.

[Mas21]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Actually external drives are DF1:, DF2: and DF3:, internal drive is named DF0: They connect in a chain into each other via pass-through conenctors in the back of each drive.

remember the connector, i had year's ago a cumana but broke so now i have to plan to get again one and maybe second

[RichL]

What are the crowd saying in SWOS?

One always sounds like they are singing ‘lager louts’ but all this time never really been sure what they all are.

[daxb]

For me it sounds like "vorwärts" what means something like (move) forward but it could be something complete different. ;-)

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Actually external drives are DF1:, DF2: and DF3:, internal drive is named DF0: They connect in a chain into each other via pass-through conenctors in the back of each drive.

In the A2000, A3000, and A4000 DF0 and DF1 are internal and DF2 and DF3 are external.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by paul1981

Amiga guide icons sometimes have this tooltype below:

FILETYPE=TEXT|ASCII|AMIGAGUIDE

Does MultiView actually read these? I think not. If not, what does, and where did these tooltypes come from originally?

Same goes for some text files:

TYPE=TEXT|ASCII

I got these examples from the Amigadev cd, but I know I've seen them elsewhere and on stuff downloaded from Aminet.

FILETYPE=ILBM

Deluxe Paint saves the above tooltype in picture icons. What the heck uses them? Is it some Commodore-era file search tool or something? Or it it just supposed to be informative to the user?

I don't believe multiview uses these.

There's an example about this in the RKM, so perhaps these tools just create the tool types because the authors read this section. http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD.../node0244.html

[Thomas Richter]

Multiview uses the datatypes descriptors to identify file types, so you are correct, the FILETYPE tool type does not matter for it.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by TCD

You can connect up to three external drives. I had two and some games actually use them.

Quite a few did though it was always annoying when one didn't. Hired Guns even told you in advance what disk you would need next, so you could swap it in while the other drive was loading.

[NLS]

Well most didn't I would say.
And the worse is that they had all kind of issues with multiple disks:

- Didn't detect them early (if you already swapped, to not tell you to do it).
- Didn't read all drives (most common, even some that did, couldn't read more "further" than df1).
- Didn't use extra RAM that was possibly available to save you from some of the swaps.
- Didn't have files optimised (or even duplicated to more than one disks for more critical files), again to save you from a few swaps.

The worse of them were even sadistic enough to request more than one swaps BEFORE going to the next actual play, even asking same disk MORE than once between swaps (wtf!)...