WHD Load on an Amiga 1000??

[barney]

I am going to add an 030 accelerator, 1MB external ram and an external hard drive to an Amiga I own.  I know the standard Amiga 1000 only has 512k chip ram, so is this going to limit me in running WHD Load on my Amiga 1000?  Do I need a minimum of 1mb or will 512k work fine?  Thanks.

[barney]

I think WHDLoad requires Kickstart 2 or higher. Assuming you've got that as well, it'll probably work. Problem is that you'll be limited to games that require very small amounts of RAM - probably just a few releases from 1985-86 before 512k was commonplace. Even though you've got a full 512k, WHDLoad itself takes up some of it, leaving less than that for the game itself. Bottom line, you can probably run things that work on a stock (256k) A1000 and not much else.

Believe it or not, but I got WHDLoad to run on WB 1.3 on my Amiga 2000.  It works rather nicely.

[barney]

I think WHDLoad requires Kickstart 2 or higher. Assuming you've got that as well, it'll probably work. Problem is that you'll be limited to games that require very small amounts of RAM - probably just a few releases from 1985-86 before 512k was commonplace. Even though you've got a full 512k, WHDLoad itself takes up some of it, leaving less than that for the game itself. Bottom line, you can probably run things that work on a stock (256k) A1000 and not much else.

That limitation is why to this day, I have no idea what non-chip ram is even for.  I always assumed that is 512 isn't enough for a game that requires 1 megabyte, it would dip into the extra ram you installed.  To this day, I am still stinkin confused about this.

[barney]

I've got a tripple rom switcher (1.3, 2.0 and 3.1)  I switch it to 1.3, boot up into workbench 3.1 and run whdload......that it.  Yes believe it or not, workbench 3.1 also runs on kickstart 1.3.

[barney]

I don't mean to beat a dead horse on this Amiga 1000 memory issue but here goes.  If I am running a game (floppy) that only has a 512kb requirement on a machine that has 512kb chip ram and 8mb fast ram, will the Amiga take advantage of the extra memory or will it ignore it and only use the 512 chip ram?  Just seeing if I will get any type of system performance / boost by installing fast ram.

[barney]

Depends on the game. Some games take advantage of additional memory, some don't.

In other words, if it's a typical 512kb game that doesn't take advantage of additional memory, then any installed Fast Ram is good as useless.  That is what I was trying to figure out.  I assumed that even though a game may not "take advantage" of additional memory, it may still help out in some invisible, "in the background" way.  Thanks.