A4000 lots of compatibility problems

[dougal]

Using Workbench 3.9 is fine , and even all the games run fine through WHDLOAD , but whenever i try and load a game from floppy disk (A500 style) , most games either crash to a software failiure or similar . Not all games but a good 60-70% .

I've tried disabling CPU caches and setting the original graphics from the pre-boot menu , but it doesnt make much of a difference .. Even tried Relokick 1.4 but im still getting the crashes .

Could it be a dirty floppy drive ? A problem with the hardware ? A conflict ? or is the A4000 just plain not as compatible as an A1200 or A500 is ?

Other than that , the system is 100% fine with both mouse/joy ports working , sound perfect , no booting problems and battery was removed before any leaking .

[Everblue]

I blame incompatabilities. Which is why why have WHDLoad

[cv643d]

You should not expect most games to run off floppy on an A4000. Even games that clames to run on A4000 can have trouble if you expanded your system.

[dougal]

Its not really expanded as such . Just instead of 25mhz it has a blizzard which increases it to 50mhz and it has the standard 2mb chip ram and 16mb fast ram .

[Everblue]

Most games were made for a bog standard A500 with 1 meg RAM.... Anything different from that is expected to give problems mate. WHDLoad fixes these problems.

[Ilwrath]

Most games were made for a bog standard A500 with 1 meg RAM.... Anything different from that is expected to give problems mate. WHDLoad fixes these problems.

Very true.  Floppy-based games especially from the A500 era do lots of nasty hardware tricks.  Some (most?) of those aren't 100% compatible with the A4000.  Very few things will work by powering up, popping in a floppy, and hoping.

You can try various step-down tools like

Degrader
options:
50hz (or 60hz if you have a PAL system and need an NTSC only game)
50hz system (ditto)
NoView


or

Tude
option:
Kick 1.3 (make sure you HAVE a kick13.rom where it looks for it)

They help and boost compatibility quite a bit, but WHDLoad is 100x easier and more reliable.  Even games that claim A4000 compatibility sometimes expected you to know you had to do these things.  Back in the day, compatibility often meant that you might be able to get this to work if you shut off every expansion, boot in an improbable configuration, and you're feeling quite lucky on the 2nd Tuesday of the month...

[Damion]

Same on the A3000, or any other non-basic A500 setup, games and demos can fail. Sometimes you're lucky... IIRC Lotus 2 works even with an '060 from floppy, simply by disabling caches.

You can get a good majority of things working by playing with degraders, but it's much easier to use WHDLoad and (worst case scenario) tweak a few tooltypes.

[rkauer]

Also some (few) AGA titles for A1200 fail miserably under A4000 when running from floppies or even from original HD installation...

[dougal]

Yep .. WHDLOAD it is  

I would have just thought that the A4000 would act like an A1200 with a 030 .