the vias on the tracks don't look the best, especially the middle one, but if I were you I would check all of them under and around the integrated circuit

That that perticular track will be issue, as other halve is still connected to layer via.

Cleaned the heads and formatting a (preused) disk did work. Knocking on wood

Coming back to my own settings:

- Standard A4000 machine spec, all on Automatic other than noted below
- ROM A4000 KS 3.2.3 (47.115)
- CPU speed set to 25Mhz (I found having this set to "Maximum" negatively impacted game/demo performance, despite being quicker to boot)
- Networking disabled
- JIT disabled
- Zorro 3 memory enabled with 1GB restricted option
- No "storage" options other than the AGS hdf added

Save states do seem to be problematic, I tested myself and saw the same fall back to the A600GS menu.

Also reconfirmed that altering options around the machine spec causes the hdf boot to fail, requiring it to be removed and re-added. I think this issue may have been raised somewhere before in relation to RDB hdf files

That HTTPS transfer works with a current version of curl, on OS 3.2.2:

curl https://www.alphavantage.co/query?function=TIME_SERIES_DAILY&symbol=MSFT&datatype=csv&apikey=YOURKEY -o RAM:msft.csv -s


Resulting stock data is:
timestamp,open,high,low,close,volume
2025-12-26,486.7050,488.1200,485.9600,487.7100,8842175
2025-12-24,485.6800,489.1625,484.8300,488.0200,5855880
2025-12-23,484.9800,487.8300,484.7400,486.8500,14683582
2025-12-22,486.1200,488.7300,482.6900,484.9200,16963019
2025-12-19,487.3600,487.8500,482.4900,485.9200,70836105
2025-12-18,478.1900,489.6000,477.8900,483.9800,28573545
etc...



Download from:
http://aminet.net/package/comm/tcp/curl-8.18-DEV-18112025

Also needs current AmiSSL installed.

I was able to get it to work one time, randomly trying different settings.  I used CD32 and 3.1 ROM, and the rest of the settings the same as you.  First time, it didn’t work. Then, I deleted, and re-added the hard disk file, and it booted right up to the main AGS menu.  I saved a game state at the main menu.  Tried a few games, worked perfectly.  But then I tried the c64 emulator, and it locked up.  I had to force restart it, the after that, every time, it comes to the “ insert workbench disk “ animation screen.  The save state also didn’t work, it would just kick back out tot the main a600gs menu.  So frustrating that it just happened to work that one time!  I’ll try tweaking settings some more and see if anything clicks.