A500 and games (not working)

[nickoteen]

Ok. I'll try. Where can I get WhichAmiga ?

[nickoteen]

Ok. I'll try. Where can I get WhichAmiga ?

Found it. Ran it under WinUAE ... offcourse it worked. Tried to run it on Amiga, the Amiga said it's not an executable file and returned error code 10 or something similar.
 
I then ran SysInfo on Amiga and compared it with WhichAmiga output under WinUAE. The configurations are almost identical (Same Agnus, Denise chips, same CPU, same available memorym same kickstarts). I say almost becouse for some reason, WhichAmiga reported the cpu speed of 9 Mhz under WinUAE, but I don't think that's something I should bang my head against.
 
So, once again, I'm where I started, at the beginning. One thing though, I checked the file sizes of WhichAmiga, both on PC and Amiga.
The one on PC was 20KB in size, but once transfered, it only took up about 8 KB on Amiga floppy. Is this normal ? I know Amiga has a completely different file systems which utilises disk space much wisely than Windows, but ... "This is not an executable file" message is bugging me. I'm thinking ... maybe not all of my AExplorer transfers are sucessfull even though I don't get any transfer errors.

[paul1981]

"This is not an executable file" message is bugging me. I'm thinking ... maybe not all of my AExplorer transfers are sucessfull even though I don't get any transfer errors.

It certainly sounds like it. This is what you need to test, and the file sizes should be identical by the way. When you look at the file size on the Amiga you'll need to use the "list" command, or if the program has an icon (like WhichAmiga does) then you can select the icon and then select Info from the Workbench menu.

[orange]

"This is not an executable file" message is normal. IIRC, you need to set file attributes to make it 'executable'. it can be done with directory opus or similar, and in AmigaDOS.

(some) file attributes and comments are lost when copying from PC because of different filesystem. so its best to copy .lha archives, because it preserves them.

but, I don't have idea what is causing games to not work. I would try to expand it with hdd and fast RAM in hope that 'whdload games' would work.

[lauri.lotvonen]

Firstly, sorry if this has been mentioned already as I browsed through the thread rather quickly.
What version of workbench are you using with AmigaExplorer ?
I had plenty problems (games not booting, file transfer hanging up) when I used and old copy of WB 1.3 with AE and it turned out that the WB disk contained a ton of old viruses. I used a adf. image downloaded from somewhere, it's called something like viruschecker.adf to remove the viruses, and voilá, the transferred adf's worked perfectly

[orange]

@lauri
its possible. still, most games are NDOS and virus can only damage bootblock in such case. but then intro wouldn't load at all.

[lauri.lotvonen]

But if the workbench disk which is used for file transfer between PC and Amiga itself is filled with viruses, it can alter the data written to the disk IIRC.

[orange]

viruses usually alter only executable files, not disk images or archives, I think.
(one could use .dms instead of .adf, to rule out data corruption in transfer, dms has some integrity check)

[nickoteen]

Ok, thanks for all your replys.
 
I think I've narroved a problem a bit.
I took out my "spare parts" only Amiga unit out of the closet, installed a fdd which it lacked and tried out all those games I was whining about not working on my second, troubling Amiga. Both units have exactly the same MBOs. Rock Lobster rev 6A.
On my spare Amiga everything works without any problems. So I figured, it must be a hardware problem. I then started replacing all the chips (Denise, Paula, Gary, CIAs, MC68KP8 ... but to no avail. The only IC still not replaced is Fat Agnus since I don't have the necessary IC removal tool to do so.
 
At this point I'm certain that it's not the dirty fdd heads, not the Amiga Explorer transfer, not the Rom sharer board (tried without it, just KS 1.3), not the viruses (checked the disks with several av utils) that was bugging me, but a hardware issue of some sort after all.
 
So, what do you think, could it be the Fatso giving me the headaches all this time ?
I'm in process of ordering two things:
 
1.) A PLCC extraction tool ( such as this: http://www.jonard.com/jonard-ecommerce/control/product/~product_id=11029 ) which will hopefully allow me to replace that last non soldered IC on the MBO
 
2.) Another rev 6A MBO in case the removal of Fat Agnus doesn't go smoothly, or it turns out it's not the Agnus but some other hw malfunction which I won't be able to fix.
 
Anywayz, thank you all for listening. Your help has been greatly appreciated.