How to setup an amiga 500 for demos

[elz]

I already have an beefed up a600 and a1200 for whd and latest 3.#? stuff. But they have difficulty running early KS 1.#? demo that where not whdload prepared or made to be run on modern amiga. I never took the bother to install KS ROM switcher as I'm pretty sure then that this 32gb CF card scsi.device might be a tad more difficult to read, so that problem become a bit more complex.


I unexpectedly got an a500 and I see it as an an opportunity to run those early demo. I know next to nothing about WB and KS 1.#? and using it with real floppy is very tedious as floppy disk and drive seem to have suffer from times and errors are very frequent, so everything quickly become long and tiresome. I wanted to get an HxC/Gotek but I'm not sure floppy is the way to go for what I want to do. I have heard about 520 accelerator that add media support. But they seem to add feature and acceleration to the a500, I dont want to sacrifice compatibility for performance.



It seems all those demos range around 10kb to 500kb and average around 64kb~130kb. they come as executable format. I believe most trackdisk demos where ported to WHD as they where quality production. But those many small executable demos, how where they intended to be run back then ? Could common scenario be someone boot WB 1.x from a floppy, then swap it for a floppy with some of demos on it and execute the files using WB or command line ? Where demos expected to be run from a special environment ? Would an hard disc solution be considerable ? Hard disk seem the ideal configuration for me, but am I to expect all kind of execution issue since those demos would assume to run on floppy and address incorrectly media ?

[A500]

1) Practically all demos made in the old days were designed to boot and run from floppies as only a very small minority of the user base had hard drives due to their high price. The way to run them was simply this: boot up your A500, insert disk in df0: (the internal disk drive). Multi-disk demos usually accepted at least one external disk drive to reduce disk swapping.

2) The executable files were (and are) run from your hard disk: go to the correct folder and run the file either through the Workbench windows or the CLI. Some demos also play nice with file managers such as Directory Opus or Filemaster. You can also run the executables from any disk - just copy them to a real floppy or make an ADF file for your Gotek. Back in the day, many collection disks (=floppies) were released that included many demos and often a stylish menu to run them from - and some are still being released today. For example:

https://www.pouet.net/search.php?wha...+box&type=prod

3) An A500 with a hard drive + Gotek (and real floppy drives for keeping it real) solution is the way to go for running all OCS/ECS demos ever released at maximum compatibility. I use an ACA500+ card with my A500 because it has practically all you need:

- You can boot the machine into KS1.2, 1.3 and 3.1 out of the box, and if you're interested in running the very few releases that require KS2.0 or KS1.1, you can add your own KS ROMs to the configuration.

- There is an option to make your A500 boot from df1:, which is ideal for running ADF images from a Gotek.

- The card has two CF slots, and an easy built-in system for setting up your CF card for the Amiga. The system is designed so that you can transfer files from your PC to a CF card and then use it directly on your A500 through the second CF slot. The first slot is "the real" Amiga hard drive which is used for booting your A500 from the hard drive. There's also a connector for the X-Surf-500 if you want to download stuff directly on the Amiga.

4) An AGA Amiga (1200/4000) with a CF card is great especially if you want to do more than watch demos and play games, but many of the old pre-AGA demos will not run correctly. That said, most if not all of the really good ones have WHDLoad versions and there is a steady flow of more coming. Of course, all AGA demos require this hardware as well (obviously ). Running the very high-end AGA demos designed for the turbo cards with a 68060 processor are best run in WinUAE unless you have a reasonably hefty stack of money you'd like to invest, and some luck to find a working card.

Hope this helps

[Photon]

Originally Posted by elz

But those many small executable demos, how where they intended to be run back then ?

On an A500 1.3, with 512k slowmem and disabled extra drives. (Very early demos (and games) until mid-1988 may be confused by the 512k slowmem, and this is the reason for those expansions having an on/off switch.

Disks were very expensive until about 1990, so they were (re)compressed and spread on packdisks. This + a Gotek should let you see a very large number of releases.

The reason that they are separate files now is that they have been preserved from those disks and indexed on searchable websites. You can put the separate files on a harddisk connected to the above rig. Kickstart 3.1 is fairly compatible and more compatible than 2.0.

For more information, read from the heading DEMOS onwards.

AGA: Most A1200 users could get a harddrive more cheaply and so most demos are made to run from harddisk.

All file demos expect to run from the CLI, not from Workbench. So they don't come with icons, you have to type their names. The packdisks provided a menu to avoid that.

[elz]

Thank you very much A500 and Photon for your outstanding reply. I will use them as building guide. Of course it's been some time since I posted and my project with this A500 has precised since.


The good news is that it seem that the idea to add an hard disk would work. I intend to have the the GottaGoFast + IDE68k and use a 4gb CF card there. My fear was that those executable would maybe only run from floppy, as the executable would directly access the media, expecting floppy disk, and would crash running from hard disk. To help them running, I intend to disable WB by removing LoadWB for Startup files and replace it with a command line shell.

My amiga500 is one of the early rev 3 board. So far I was able to change the xtal to PAL one, set Agnus in PAL mode by removing a leg, and installed a patched ks 1.3.3 with 512kb of rom for scsi.device fixing A17 line. The Agnus chip was already upgraded to support 1mb and on the trapdoor I don't see a switch to disable that expansion. Here is a picture of the board after I received it. I only heard problem about the way they changed memory mapping for the 2mb upgrade, but I can understand there is also some considerations for the 1mb upgrade.


I think I will put a Gotek in the mix, I'm now considering to get the internal or external version. The internal is cheaper and more "sleeper", but seem hard to see the screen and harder to interface. All those archive of ADF demos you told me about make the idea very interesting to have an Gotek to support an IDE68k + CompactFlash setup. Those launcher menu look like some small demos already !



For PC maintenance, what I do with my a600 and a1200 is take off the single CF Card and put it on an USB adapter and boot it in an WinUAE configuration that represent the hardware machine. It make upgrade easy since it allow to make backup and then test it. I was even once able to investigate a problem I initially believed was caused by faulty hardware. The emulation is just that good, always impress me.