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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Gaming => Topic started by: sharpie on November 25, 2003, 10:39:04 PM
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I used to have an A500 with the extra 512kb of RAM. What would you say is the most powerful Amiga system (that runs all of the original Amiga games)?
Are the 600, 1000, and 1200 better options in terms of speed, memory and hard drive options? Or can I supe up my A500 to be good enough?
And how much of a difference does it make? Weren't most games back then made to run on A500 as the lowest common denominator?
Thoughts? I am in the market for more Amiga hardware :)
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Depends on the games you intend to play. The A500 is better suitable for old games since not every game will work on the A1200, which is THE computer to have for (example) AGA games. Add some nifty hardware and you'll get a machine that can handle somewhat modern 3D games too, like Quake.
Note though, that the A500 doesn't have a harddrive so the A1200 is also better suited for large games that can be installed onto the HDD or WHDLoad'ed.
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To run original games? As in the majority of the games ever written? An A500 with 1Meg and KS1.3 is all you need, maybe adding a few external floppy drives.
The vast majority of old school games were made to run on an OCS or ECS based machine with KS1.3. Some older games will refuse to run on this but most will. There are also degrading tricks to help run stubborn older games.
Newer Amigas with heavy expansions don't do much to improve
old school games.
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1st, What is an AGA game?
2nd, is it not possible to connect an external HD to the A500?
3rd, is there somekind of masterlist for determining compatibility of games between the various Amigas?
Lastly, am I correct in presuming that anything beyond the A1200 is overkill for gaming?
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The vast majority of old school games were made to run on an OCS or ECS based machine with KS1.3. Some older games will refuse to run on this but most will. There are also degrading tricks to help run stubborn older games.
I don't want to get annoying, is there somewhere I can look up these acronyms? I was 13 when I owned my original A500. ECS and OCS don't ring a bell.
I guess I am interested in the games that were out when the A500 was king, but I am also clueless as to what games came after. I thought that gaming on the Amiga kind of died after that but maybe I'm wrong. Were there any classics or top shelf games that were geared towards later generation Amigas?
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To put in simple terms without going into an miga history.
The Amiga 500 is the most compatible for old games.
There were games made later on that will not be compatible for one reason or another. Yes there is still a few new games coming out to this day for the Amiga. Quake II is the last one I can think of.
When looking for games for your Amiga 500 most of them will say "For Amiga 1000 500 2000", but some may say "For OCS/ECS".
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By the way, welcome to Amiga.org!! I hope you enjoy your stay:-)
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Oh yeah, KS stands for KickStart. This is the part of the operating system that resides on a rom inside the computer. The Amiga 500 over the years came with KS1.2, KS1.3 and KS2.04. The one you would preferably want is KS1.3. To find out simply turn on the computer with no floppy disks inserted and see what the prompter says. If it is not KS1.3 you may want to consider buying and replacing the KickStart.
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Amiga 500 with KS1.2 will be just as compatible as 1.3. Have you honestly ever ran into a game that doesn't boot on 1.2 and does on 1.3?
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x56h34 wrote:
Amiga 500 with KS1.2 will be just as compatible as 1.3. Have you honestly ever ran into a game that doesn't boot on 1.2 and does on 1.3?
Yes!!!!!!!! (!!!!!!!!)
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Ok, great roundup, I'll go read this history of the Amiga to catchup on the gaps, but first, what is an AGA game?
I don't think you answered that last tidbit yet, did you?
Thanks for all your help!
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AGA is the graphics chipset that came in the Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 and CD32 computers. It is newer than the original OCS/ECS graphics chipsets that came in the earlier Amigas and is not 100% backwards compatible. Any game written for AGA will not run on an Amiga 500. Luckily there was very few games that were AGA only.
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Not me. :-) I am not saying there are none, but probably it's a rare ocasion, and not worth it as if it would be if you had a let's say 2.04 powered A500.
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history of AGA (http://amiga.emugaming.com/amigaaga.html) : nice info
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I'm partial to the Pegasos II w/ a G3-600 or G4-1000, a Voodoo4 video card, and SCSI controller.
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I'm partial to the Pegasos II w/ a G3-600 or G4-1000, a Voodoo4 video card, and SCSI controller.
Sorry for my ignorance but does that run the original Amiga game titles?
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Only under emulation I would expect.
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The Amiga had various chipsets over the years. The major variation deals with Graphics.
OCS is the original chipset.
ECS is the Enhanced chipset, essentially it's exactly like OCS but it has a few 64colour screenmodes called "Extra Half Brite". Essentially it took the first 32 colours and then dimmed them to half their intensity. :P
A500's had either OCS or ECS.
AGA is the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AFAIR). It allowed for screen modes of up to 256 colours, and HAM8 mode would allow for almost true-colour graphics (instead of HAM6 which gave you 4096 colours). There were a few other upgrades, but essentially AGA had more colours and more screenmodes. :P
AGA were used in Amiga 1200's, Amiga 4000's and CD32's (oh, and those Index Access computers.)
AGA is fairly compatible to ECS/OCS, and in fact you can boot your AGA systems into ECS/OCS, but some games still had some compatibility issues. To make matters worse, all of the AGA systems had 020 or better CPUs which caused more problems with incompatibilities.
So, if you're really into playing older games, you might want to have an A500, KS1.3, extra floppy, 512megs of ram with the slow fast ram.
For the AGA games an A1200 is pretty decent out of the box. And it can use your A500's monitor, joysticks and extra drive. The A1200 already has 2 megs of chip ram, so most games should be happy. :P
Oh, almost forgot, some of the newer "Escom" era A1200's use a modified floppy drive which might not boot any of the older games. :(
However, a lot of the newer games require a more powerful CPU, harddrive, CD drive and more ram. ;)
Confused yet?
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Don't Feed The Troll.
@Downix dammy people post quickly.
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jeffimix wrote:
Don't Feed The Troll.
You're a troll :-?
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Thoughts? I am in the market for more Amiga hardware :)
Whoa how did I miss this? :-D Keep an eye on my auctions!
CLICK THIS LINK AND BOOKMARK (http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=redrumloa&include=0&since=-1&sort=3&rows=50)
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Is it not possible to use a HD with the A500?
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@sharpie
Only modern games, like Quake II.
As for a HD, there are several 3rd party HD options for the 500, but it does not include one by default. You can even make your own using plans from Aminet.
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Ok, so I get the picture that the A1200 is probably the best bet.
Can someone detail me the *ideal* A1200 in terms of speed, graphics, hard drive and any other peripherals?
Whenever I see people talk about their Amigas they always mention things that I have never heard of, Fast Ram this, slow fast that, bla bla bla. If price were no issue, what would be the setup for the perfect A1200, with gaming in mind?
Btw, thanks to everyone for the great info so far.
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@sharpie
Some basic terminology that is banded around..
OCS/ECS/AGA refer to different versions (in chronological order) of the chipset that gave the amiga it's original graphical and sound capabilities. AGA was the largest improvement, offering greater speed and more colourful displays.
This chipset share a block of memory with the processor, called 'Chip Ram'. Only the chipset or the processor can access this memory at any given instant. On the original amiga systems, which used a motorola 68000 processor, this set up was ideal, since the 68000 could only access the memory 50% of the time anyway (slight oversimplification but generally true) - usually every even clock cycle. The custom chips therefore were able to use every odd clock cycle.
So the design allowed the 68000 to run virtually unimpeeded whilst the chipset did its magic in parallel.
The problem with this design is when you get faster CPU's such as the 68020 and above. These can access memory every cycle and are forced to wait when the chipset is accessing the memory.
Even the 68000 itself can be slowed down when there is a lot of chipset activity using the Chip Ram (hence needing more than 50% of the available time).
So, the designers also came up with a solution for that too - an area of memory useable by the CPU but off limits to the chipset. This memory is generally known as 'Fast RAM'.
On the original 68000, the presence of fast ram made only a small impact on the speed (apart from in a few rare cases where both CPU and chipset were very busy at the same time).
However, on systems using faster CPUs such as the 68020 and above, the impact of fast ram is rather more profound.
A bare A1200 which uses the AGA chipset and a 14MHz 68020 CPU typically doubles in speed when you add some Fast RAM (usually as an expansion card that fits in the trapdoor of the case).
For CPU expansions carrying a faster 68020, or 68030,40 or 60, Fast RAM is a must. My 68040 actually runs *slower* than the bare A1200 if the fast ram is removed :lol:
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Another easy way to put it, comparing to pc things, Chip Ram is like the memory on the gfx card, Fast Ram is like the Ram you add on the motherboard. It's ofcourse a lot complicated than that but it the easiest way to explain ...
Adding a harddrive to your A500 is no problem, keeping a few things in mind. Most harddrive-cases are attached on the left side of the A500 and demand a scsi harddrive and not ide. That's one thing. Also to make full use of it you better have kickstart 2.0 because I think that you are too limited when using lower kickstarts ...
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well the most powerful Amiga beyond the A500 without a doubt has to be the AmigaOne XE!! :-D
only issue is I dont know if the PCI card with the AGA chips on it ( to play old games 8-) ) is still going to be released.
having said that this is the eXtrEEm PoWeR Amiga to play games on but I mean the sort of games you et at LAN parties not games like Lotus3, thrust master, or Lemmings ;-) :-(
the price at this stage means you'd need to be pritty serious about your amigas so a base A1200 might be a good place to start these can be had for about $100AUD ($50USD?) second hand
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A1200 with Blizzard1230IV an 32 MB FastRam and big harddisk is a good thing to start!
Playing Genetic Spezies makes me happy :-)))))))))
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@sharpie
Ok I think you are being provided with perhaps too much information at the moment :-)
For a nice system that will play most (not all, though) games, you'd like an A1200 with an internal hard drive (needn't be big, a few hundred megabytes will do it) and perhaps some extra memory. Extra memory can be had as such, or together with an accelerator. An accelerator may speed up a few games a little (most games were designed to work with an A500 anyway, so an A1200 is quite fast enough), but is not really necessary.
An A500 with a hard drive is of course a possibility too, but then you will miss out on those AGA games, there were some good ones too!
You can probably find a nice A1200 setup at EBay for a good price, I suggest you go do some hunting :-)
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woow you lot know how to confuse a poor "newbie" listen here sharpie:
if you want ONLY the oldest games get an A500 1.3rom with some extras (easy to find on ebay.com/amibench.org just follow the auctions a while and see what things go for so you dont get ripped off) extra hd + ram etc is also very nice to have
IF you also want the newer games + some of the same games you can find on A500 only with better gfx etc get an A1200 also (if it were me and i only wanted to get into gaming again id get both) just make sure you get an Commodore A1200 NOT Escom A1200! HD ram cpu upgrade etc are nice things idealy get a 030 card! if you get all this (should not be that hard to find at an ok price) you will be able to run at least 90% of the games you can find on Amiga.
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Thanks for all the great info. Seems like the HD for the A500 is doable but would be better with the KS2.1 which as it happens might not be compatible with all classic games that came before it, creating somewhat of a problem?
Does this problem exist for the 1200 as well?
Also, I heard there is somekind of switcher to allow you to switch your A500 between the 3 different KS versions, is this easy to operate,aquire, etc.?
I think I am going to cover both bases and get both the 1200 and 500. Is there any advantage to getting a 500 that has ECS instead of OCS? And does anyone recommend a certain hard drive for it?
Thanks again for the stellar info.
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There are a couple of ways to switch ROMs on an A500. The first is to get a hardware ROM switcher - for that, you need both ROMs, and I think there's some keyboard shortcut or something to switch to the desired ROM.
Another way is, if your A500 is expanded with fast RAM, to get a softkick program which will load the alternate ROM into memory. This takes up a lot of memory, especially on a 1MB Amiga, however. Also, legally a bit dodgy.
Basically the further away you move from the Kickstart 1.3, the 68000 CPU and OCS, the harder it gets to run the old games, so A1200 has the A500/KS2 compatibility problems and more.
But I gave my A500 away when I got an A1200 some time ago, and I never had much trouble playing the games I wanted to play. I'd say get an A1200, and if the price is right, and you have the space for it, an A500 with KS1.3 and some fastram to complement it :-)
For the A500, I used a GVP HD for a while. There's two models I remember, the Impact II HD8+ series, which gave you a HD and allowed for further memory expansion, or the A530 Turbo, which gave you a 40MHz 68030 processor on top of that :-D
Edit: sp
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sharpie: your best option for a amiga games machine is an Amiga 1200 with a 030 card and a HDD , and i can safely tell you that all your fav games will work no matter what (if u have that config) but for some old and dogdy made a500 games well then u have to resort to stuff like WHDLOAD and thats not a downside at all.
as for an hdd on a500 , sure thats dooable i had one and i still do, but seriously ks1.3 aint really that good for a hdd, 2.04 and up is better but still annoying so i would yet again say...get an Amiga1200 and a 030 and a hdd (any hdd will work (ide) .. , 2.5 hdds fits nicely inside the desktop normally but since theese are rather pricy well normal 3.5 hdds are cheaper and bigger (physically) and might not fit inside the a1200 case, but its possible and btw you need a HDD cable set for such which consists of a powercable and a 44pin cable to 40pin cable(flatcable) , all of it is possible to make on your own but if you cant/wont then there is always some amigashops who have theese cable sets in stock still..
hope this helped..
http://www.whdload.de
thats the link to the whdload thingy i talked about, atm over 1600 games works with whdload.
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Of course if the Gentleman has a PC, then he could buy the "Amiga Forever" package... THat reall is the "Ultimate" Gaming Amiga... since one can run all Amiga games on that (I've not found any that don't work yet) and it's a whoel lot cheaper, less messy and less likely to die than real hardware
To try it out download WinUAE... Of course you will need Amiga Forever to get the Amiga ROMs/
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It's times like this that i am glad i got my A1200! :-)
The A1200 i think is a very compatiable machine. I have had almost no trouble playing the old games. Before i got the PPC and HD i used to boot up the disk but also changed to OCS mode and clicked on "nocache" on the early startup menu. That basically solved most of the problems.
Now that i have an HD and PPC i mainly use JST and WHDLoad to play them good ole games. Not only do most of the games work, but you can now play them on Workbench (without quitting), instead of booting up the disks. Which, i'm sure many people will agree, makes life a lot easier and is what everybody wants. Of course, i can still boot up disks, as if the A1200 was stock, by holding the 2 key when booting up. The next thing i need to get is a sd/ff so i can view these on my monitor, not tv!
So as you can see the A1200 is a very good gaming machine. I get the best of both worlds. I play games ranging from Lemmings and Speedball 2, to Quake and Wipeout 2097! I can very much recommend on A1200 to anyone, even though a certain someone detests them! :-?