Bought an A500. Now What?

[amigaksi]

>by carvedeye on 2008/12/23 9:33:36

>hundreds of pounds?.....you can buy the roms pretty cheap nowadays and harddrives are cheap as chips?

Although he did want to use for games and newer roms and hard drives will add a level of incompatibility.

[kedawa]

darksun9210 wrote:

WHDLoad? whats that? - its a program that takes floppy games, and allows you to have them installed, and run from hard disk. much quicker, and no more disk swapping! :-D
but bear in mind, that alot of WHDload modified games want one whole meg of chipram, so you may have to do the "cut and jumper" modification to your A500 to turn the 512k expansion in the trapdoor into chipram. more detail on that can be found or asked for as needed. also fastram will help as WHDLoad can "pre-cache" the game data there for instant midgame loading. helpfull for swapping scenes in adventure games for example.

I think my A500 may already have this mod.
I was looking at the memory map using the software on my extras disk, and it shows 1024K chipram and 0K fastram.
Does that mean it's modded already?  Or is there some way that amigados can use fastram as chipram?

[bloodline]

kedawa wrote:

darksun9210 wrote:

WHDLoad? whats that? - its a program that takes floppy games, and allows you to have them installed, and run from hard disk. much quicker, and no more disk swapping! :-D
but bear in mind, that alot of WHDload modified games want one whole meg of chipram, so you may have to do the "cut and jumper" modification to your A500 to turn the 512k expansion in the trapdoor into chipram. more detail on that can be found or asked for as needed. also fastram will help as WHDLoad can "pre-cache" the game data there for instant midgame loading. helpfull for swapping scenes in adventure games for example.

I think my A500 may already have this mod.
I was looking at the memory map using the software on my extras disk, and it shows 1024K chipram and 0K fastram.
Does that mean it's modded already?  Or is there some way that amigados can use fastram as chipram?

Sounds like it... if it wasn't for the fact you have Workbench 1.3, I might have suggested you had an A500+... Ok simple way to check, have a look in the trapdoor underneith the machine.

[kedawa]

It's definitely an A500 and it has the A501 module.  The realtime clock even keeps time.

Are there any disadvantages to having 1MB chipram as opposed to 512KB of each?

[darksun9210]

nope not really. if anything, having more chipram is more of an advantage than a half and half config, as the custom chips can access this ram for storing more graphics and sound samples and the like.  :-)

[kedawa]

That's good to know.  I was afraid some of my favorite games might have issues with the lack of fastram, as some of them didn't have music without the A501.
Hopefully it's just the amount of ram that counts, and not the specific configuration.

[TjLaZer]

Some old games will need 512k fast RAM to work or will choke on 1MB Chip.  Use Degrader to get around tha problem!  Find it on Aminet.

[kedawa]

There seems to be several programs that do the same thing, but I'll deal with that when the problem comes up.

What's the story on HD floppy discs?
I've used them on Amigas before without any problem, but I've heard that they are less reliable in the long run.
I'm not terribly worried about disc reliability, since I can just back everything up on my pc anyway, but I would opt for double density discs if using HD discs will shorten the life of my floppy drive.
Do I have anything to worry about?

[Jeff_HxC]

the other way is to use an floppy disk drive emulator :

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=KtazXt_Kc4s
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=9JtvMyur-DY

[Dandy]

darksun9210 wrote:

amiga explorer should come with everything you need for the amiga side too. not sure about the USB to serial adapters. i can't imagine it being a problem,  though could be wrong  :-?

Don't forget that AmigaExplorer is part of the commercial "AmigaForever" Amiga emulation package for the PC and only available by buying AmigaForever, IIRC.

[kedawa]

I know it's included with AF, but I didn't check to see if it is available separately.
I'm still waiting for my USB<->Serial adapter to arrive, and I still haven't found a compatible null modem cable.  I'll probably end up making the cable myself.

[_stet_]

A free alternative to the AF/AmigaExplorer route is transwarp. I use it all the time to transfer ADFs using a null modem cable & cheap USB-serial adapter.

Here's the homepage for transwarp & ADF Sender Terminal:
http://adfsender.stoeggl.com/
Here's info on how to get transwarp over to your Amiga:
http://adfsender.stoeggl.com/adfsenderterminal/methods.html

Transwarp is also part of the free "Hombre" package (which includes several other utilities related to ADF transfer with an A500). You can read about it here:
http://wiki.abime.net/transfer:hombre

Re your question about HD disks, my understanding is that it's just a reliability issue. Data may not survive as long on an HD disk formatted as DD as it would on a true DD disk.

Hope that helps.

[kedawa]

That's cool.  I'll have to look into that once I have the cables ready to go.