Hi, I think my mid life crisis has started

[moley147]

Hi everyone,

I rediscovered my A500 with 40MB GVP HD and my A1200 while tidying out my loft a couple of weeks ago.

A500 was bought around 1990 and the A1200 bought in the early 2000s.

I was programming an AticAtac conversion before moving from Prestwich to Cumbria in 1995. The graphics were ripped using Action Replay 3 from an amiga Spectrum emulator of AticAtac and the SFX were digitized from the spectrum too. The music was a mod version of 2Unlimited ‘Get Ready for this’ but I did not write the mod player code that was dropped into my source code. The original graphics were created Andy Palmer of Arcade Club (Bury, Leeds and Blackpool) fame who also tweaked the AticAtac speccy graphics. We wanted the graphics to look the same but with more colours and no attribute clash.

It was about 90%+ complete. If you want a laugh then here are some videos that I found on an old PC HD that I uploaded to youtube 7 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKc7Sfa_ULgmzI1K6BjlR3vQCi-h0vi1V

I was also working on a full screen scroller of Sabre Wulf but that is nowhere near completion. I was going to use the same scroller routine to convert Starquake and Underwurlde.

Anyway, since rediscovering my Amigas I thought I work see if they work. Both do although there is an HD error on my GVP when booting workbench. I did backup my GVP HD by Parallel (I think) cable  to PC before storing them in the attic. So all of my source code is okay (I hope).

I installed a 240MB HD in the A1200 when I bought but it only has WB 3.0 installed on it and a few games that were from the pack that came with it. It did not run most games so I never really used it before it was stored.

I just bought a Greaseweasel 4.1 and that works fine and a 23 pin RGB out to HDMI adaptor. That also works okay.

I did buy a PCMCIA CF adaptor along with a CF to SD card adaptor plus SD card but it does not work in the 1200. It just has a clock waiting icon whenever it is inserted and locks the 1200 up and when it is removed then an error pops up in German (even though locale is set to english) and the Amiga unlocks and starts responding again. Fat95 etc etc seems to be in the right place and the install floppy seemed to install everything okay. It was mentioned that maybe upgrading the kickstart roms to 3.1 might be needed to get it to work. So I have ordered 3.1.4 roms.

Today I found my old Catweasel MK4 PCI card but I cannot test it due to my oldest PC being Windows 7 and it wont recognise the drivers. PC recognises the card but It needs drivers. If I can get it working then I will sell it because my Greaseweasel does the same job.

I am very interested in the Larazrustorm, PiStorm setup after watching a video last night.

Thats about it

Thanks

Ian

[TjLaZer]

Hey, it's actually a great time right now for Retro tech and Commodores, and Amigas!  Lots of new hardware, new software, games, etc.  Lots of options out there to max the machines out, etc.  Have fun!

[OldAmigan]

@moley147

Hi and welcome.

PiStorm32 Lite with a Pi4B works well in the A1200 and lets you have loads of storage and extra RAM, wifi, ethernat and USB. Also HDMI out except for games, although you can use a Framethrower, which redirects the RGB output to the Pi, so you can just use the one HDMI monitor/TV.

Do you know about the various user group meeting within a reasonable distance of Cumbria?

[moley147]

@moley147
Do you know about the various user group meeting within a reasonable distance of Cumbria?

I haven’t a clue mate. If you could point me in the right direction then I’d appreciate it. At the moment I am still trying to get my amiga setup up tweaked correctly. My 40MB HD GVP for my 500 sounds like it’s chewing rocks so I bought ZuluSCSI to replace it before it completely fails. Plus I still want to back it up in just in case my backups aren’t fully up to date.

I also found some old amiga disks which I backed up to PC and some old PC HD’s with some of my Amiga stuff on it.

I also found some old PC source code that I was messing around with in the 90s doing hardware scrolling in asm (pre win95) by addressing the VGA hardware directly. I did have a nice 1 byte per pixel 320x256 in 256 colours (not 320x200) hardware scroll. Modern PC’s wont touch it so I googled and just found out about DOSBOX but I have never used it but it might allow me to run it. Plus I also found my original source code to the menu system for the VooDoo compilation games and apps CDs that I wrote in the early 90s when I was asked if I could write a reusable menu. I can’t remember how many VooDoo CDs use my menu but a few certainly do because I remember the graphics while I was writing and tweaking the menu system. I was never really part of the scene BITD, I just knew a few people that knew some other people that were into that scene. I think I wrote parts of it in quick basic and other bits in assembler. All I really remember is that it used pkunzip. I’d have to look at the code to see how I did it. 30+ years and my memory isn’t what it used to be.