Newbie from the Crypt

Hello there; as implied by the title I'm totally new to this so excuse the up-&-coming cluelessness


Right: I'm running Winuae & AIAM on a 1.8 athlon 256mb geoforce2 XP machine. I've got a legal kick (3.1) workbench thing, so I should be sorted, right? Er, nope

My problem is that when I downloaded Black Crypt (thus the title) and Wizardry 6 from back2roots & try to run them I get an error message about 34 kickrom.

I've looked this up & it seems that I needed 1.3 rom. Great, can get that. However, I've then read that you can't run HD's from 1.3, and as both of these are HD's I'm stuck. I get a hand inserting icon of 1.3 but can't work out how to run them or AIAM using 1.3.

Looking over the posts here I see I need a save disk, which I've got but I really can't get to the stage where I can load them, so if possible, can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?



Secondly, when running AIAM I have a problem with the keyboard: many games (Altered Beast, Disposable Hero etc) load fine but then say 'press fire to start'. I've tried fiddling with the keyboard/mouse emulation in winuae (by pressing F12) but can't seem to get it to work. No keyboard presses mimic 'fire' & so I'm stuck looking at the intro screen. I'm sure I'm missing something really obvious, but again, could someone tell me how to get this to work?



Sorry if this goes against the rules of the forum, I'm not trying to get the kicks or anything, merely trying to work out how to use them! If anyone could help, it would be much appreciated. I've downloaded a few configs (from back2roots) but they don't seem to work- I suspect its because AIAM has only detected my original 3.1 rom/workbench, but I'm not sure. I understand how to run ADF's but running the HD images is proving ultra-tricky.


Thanks in advance if anyone can help

[CodyJarrett]

Welcome to the EAB, Step!

Do you mean AIAB (Amiga In A Box), rather than AIAM?

And when you say that Black Crypt and Bane Of The Cosmic Forge are 'HDs' do you mean that they need to be run from a hard drive? They are better when running from a hard disk, but you can also use them from the floppies.

I'm also not sure what you mean when you say an 'error message about 34 kickrom' - where is this and what is the exact message?

In the 'Game and I/O Ports' of the WinUAE configuration there are two mouse ports. Mouse port 1 was for the joystick, so you should set that up as Keyboard Layout A, B or C. I usually use Layout B, which is the cursor keys plus Right Ctrl for fire. You can also use a PC joystick or joypad.

There are some guides to setting up WinUAE here: http://jambo.abime.net/howto.php

We also have an IRC channel if you need to have a realtime chat about setting up the emulator - server = abime.net / channel = #abime.net

Thanks for the reply

Er, yes, did mean AIAB! My mistake, suppose it could stand for 'Amiga in a mess' The files I've got for those two set themselves up in the HD subfolder of AIAB & are Amiga HD files, I think- they use WHDload to run. (version 15 unregistered)

The error message is 'Dos error # 205 (object not found) on reading devs:kickstarts/kick34005.a500 which I presume means they don't run on 3.1?

If they don't then I guess I need to run 1.3 and winuae as a bog-standard Amiga500 etc, but reading through various FAQ's suggests that, that set-up can't read HD's- & something which is even more puzzling is that back2roots claims that their ecs30 config will run them! (It uses 3.0, but unfortunately their downloadable configs are for Fellow)

I've looked over those FAQ's before, but am still stumped. I'm not very good at technical stuff, and am a little over-whelmed by it! I loaded up AIAB 'cause I knew I wasn't going to be good at tinkering too much, & assumed (highly naively it would seem ) that all games would run...!

Not on IRC, so can't use that. More help would be appreciated, although thanks for sorting the keyboard thing

[CodyJarrett]

Yes, it's a WHDLoad error message. You just need to put the files mentioned in the error message into your devs/kickstart directory of Workbench. Send me a Private Message if you have trouble getting these...

You can set up hard disks with an A500 set-up. Back To The Roots also supply ADF versions of the games, so you could just run them from floppy.

[wakeupbomb]

you need to obtain some files off Aminet
I think you need skick344.lha from Aminet and then you need the kickstart 1.3 file which you rename to kick34005.a500
You put these in devs:kickstarts/ and it should work fine.
I did this and I don't get that error anymore

Hope this helps. I can TRY going into more detail if that doesn't make sense

Thx- but still stuck. Ok, get to the 1.3 workbench screen, but don't know how to mount the HD's. AIAB has a folder for them, but don't know how to set it up so it can run on its own, without AIAB.

If I use an AIAB config I can get them mounted but still have a problem:

If I run Winuae with kick 2.0 & workbench [Full 500& 600 set-up] I get the same message (with WHDload 14 being used) if I use 1.3 I get an error message from WHDload about failing to load (121) aargh!


Seriously, if you could either send me a config or type one up that is known to work with the HD version of Black Crypt I would be really grateful!

that last msge was put up while I typed, so ignore my last one, as I try to get files/solution etc



Thankyou!

Couldn't get skick344 from aminent, but got version 345 (for 2.0)

Am off to see if the wizard is working...


Nope, still no joy. Get an error 121 message from WHDload.


Back to square one it seems. To the guy above could you go into a bit more detail about your set-up, please? At this point I refuse to be beaten. Black Crypt will run!

[wakeupbomb]

what files did you put in devs:/kickstarts ?
Mine has two files in it
kick34005.a500
kick34005.a500.RTB

kick34005.a500 is the kickstart 1.3 which you have to obtain on your own
kick34005.a500.RTB is in skick344.lha OR skick345.lha


Hope this helps

[andreas]

Originally posted by Step
However, I've then read that you can't run HD's from 1.3, and as both of these are HD's I'm stuck. I get a hand inserting icon of 1.3 but can't work out how to run them or AIAM using 1.3.

Ok, get to the 1.3 workbench screen, but don't know how to mount the HD's.

Well I don't know WHERE you got the info that you can't run HDs from 1.3, but it's no longer valid: you CAN!
You need the file FastFileSystem to mount HDs under 1.3, though! FFS can be taken from a WB 1.3 disk or disk image. I know it's not easy to get this file off the WB (if you can't get it yourself, I'll mail it to you because I think I'm not allowed to post it here, if anyway, please tell me anyone! ) but maybe you'll succeed with ADFOpus as well!
Recent (!) WinUAE versions have FileSys option in Hard File Settings, that's where you can set the path where your FFS binary resides!
Should work a treat now.

[Chuckles]

Actually, you've been able to run with a HD using Kickstart 1.3 in WinUAE forever. You just couldn't boot from the HD with Kickstart 1.3 until the FastFileSystem workaround came along. Before that you had to boot from a floppy, and the startup sequence on the floppy could re-do all of the assigns to reference directories on the HD so that you could eject the floppy and forget about it till the next reboot. The FastFileSystem workaround makes it a whole lot easier though - Thanks, Toni! (Now if I could just figure out how to do the same thing with my REAL A500)

Ok, I take back the suggestion that WinUae was lacking features! Bad FAQ!


I'm still puzzled by a couple of things:

Thanks wakeupbomb for the tips but they didn't seem to help. Renaming my 1.3 didn't do the trick. Moreover, I'm confused since why does creating a folder in the workbench directory for a couple of roms help? skick445.lha renamed to kick34005.a500.RTB seems perculiar since its not even a rom; there's already a Roms folder (where mine are located). I am working on a PC knowledge base so
I'll take it for granted that it'll work, was just puzzled about why it would/what this folder does, since its not there at the start.

Secondly, this HD mounting thing. Well, I've privately posted people for help so hopefully that's sorted.



Anyhow, thanks all for helping, it looks like I've got a loooong way to go before I can claim retro-knowledge With any luck you won't get a return of the newbie from the crypts II [tm]!


On the plus side, Exile AGA has always worked the reason I got into all of this- my old BBC stand off between Elite & Exile can finally be resolved. With good graphics!

[CodyJarrett]

The reason that you need two sets of ROMs is that one is for the WinUAE side of things and the other is for the virtual Amiga side of things.

You've already installed AIAB (which includes the emulator configuration files) and WinUAE (which provides the emulation). The Amiga ROMs don't come with either of these, but you've managed to find and use them correctly.

AIAB also comes with a mostly pre-set up Workbench, the Amiga operating system, to make the Amiga part of the emulation easier.

As you mentioned earlier, AIAB uses a tool called WHDLoad (Cody's WHDLoad FAQ). This is an Amiga application and has nothing to do with emulation - I use it on my real Amiga, but it also works very well under emulation.

WHDLoad installs Amiga games to hard disk. A specific installer is written for each game and that installer runs under the WHDLoad system. When it was first written, WHDLoad was used to run games from hard disk that weren't compatible with the Amiga Disk Operating System. They were in a non-DOS format and couldn't be installed, as it wasn't possible to copy and files off the disks. WHDLoad solved this by providing a system where an image of the disks (or files extracted from the disks) could be run in Workbench.

Some of the more recent WHDLoad installers use an extra feature of WHDLoad called KickEmu. This is for games that make a lot of calls to the ROM. WHDLoad uses an image of the ROM, which is copied to memory and accessed there. The ROM file (kick34005.A500) and an associated .RTB file (kick34005.A500.RTB) is stored in the devs/kickstarts directory of Workbench.

Two games which use WHDLoad and this feature are the ones you downloaded from Back To The Roots. Black Crypt was written when A500s still roamed the wild freely. The WHDLoad install of Black Crypt needs to make ROM calls to the A500 ROM, which has been loaded from devs/kickstarts/kick34005.A500 and stored in memory.

To sum up, one ROM file is used by WinUAE to emulate the Amiga and the other ROM file is used by an Amiga application that installs games to hard disk.

The reason that renaming skick445.lha to kick34005.A500.RTB didn't work is that skick445.lha is a compressed archive of the type LHA, which is the Amiga equivalent of a zip file. The kick34005.A500.RTB file is actually stored inside the skick445.lha archive.

Ah, ok, understand the relation now

On a related note, I've now got Wizardry working yet Black Crypt eludes me. (Get a corruted HD message, but since its from back2roots I can't belive it is- so I assume its my fault) Searching around lead me to WHDload's homepage & their patches. Now, as far as I understand, the patches are to load floppies (ADF's) to HD's but am unsure if they also patch existing HD's as well.

Sorry to constantly ask for clarification, but is this the case? I've downloaded the WHDload package for Black Crypt, but don't want to run anything straight away if its going to do something drastic.


Thanks again for the freiendly help

[CodyJarrett]

The WHDLoad installers are written to install games from floppy disks (they won't necessarily be ADFs - on real Amigas, the disks will be in the floppy drive). Running the Black Crypt WHDLoad installer won't help with your problem.

What is the exact error message?

If I run it through 3.1 workbench I get:

"These data/disks are damaged or this is an unsupported version"

If I run it through 1.3 workbench I get the old '121 error'.

Run through 2.0 the same 'dos error 205' is present.; seemingly 3.1 picks up on the devs/kickstarts folder but 2.0 doesn't. Haven't a clue about 1.3.

I've run the ADF version with a save disk, but this crashes after the save party screen. I will be tinkering again to try to sort this.

My thoughts on this are (since Wizardry runs): a) I've got a corrupt HD. This seems unlikely since it comes from back2roots. b) My HD still isn't set up properly, which is more than likely or c) I've got the wrong WHDload program (thus my looking for their patch, or not patch as it turned out. PC thinking again....)

I'm betting on b) but I really lack the ability to set up a HD in 1.3. I guess I'm going to give up, unless I can figure out the problem with saving, which is a pity since I've heard its pretty cool :shrug


Oh well, you've been more than helpful