Why do Amiga games crash so offen?

[HE-MAN]

Hi!

Amiga I my favorit system, but one think I don't understand and I never had is why dose game offen crash and frize on the Amiga. Even if you play a game on Amiga Emulator its happend offen. I know some games is real hard to play with out this happening like Moonstone for exampel.

Do someone know why this happend offen on the Amiga? And are there any way to not let it happend?

[Coder]

If you play a lot of "cracked" games that might be the cause. The screw up some stuff sometimes. And also a lot of games did not follow the "rules" for programming set by Amiga. They would use "dirty hacks" to make it run faster.

Coder

[KennyR]

I don't seem to recall Amiga games crashing often, especially if it was the boot-from-floppy type.

[alx]

I haven't done much serious gaming on the 'miggy for a while, and I don't have any recent games so I cannot speak much for more recent hardware/software.

Many years ago I used to play loads of games on the A500, but I can only really remember one or maybe two instances when a game GURUed out, and it was so unusual it was quite shocking :-o

[Ilwrath]

I don't understand and I never had is why dose game offen crash and frize on the Amiga.

I don't really think it happens all that often, in comparison to some other systems I've played.  Mostly, if a game crashes, it's usually because you were trying to play it on a system other than it was intended.  

I know some games is real hard to play with out this happening like Moonstone for exampel.

Yes, Moonstone is very picky.  PAL A500 or bust.  I don't think I've seen it crash but once or twice on a real 512k chipram/512k baseboard A500, but it barely works (or doesn't even work!) on anything else.  Often it is either because of old copy protection, or a bad crack.  It's hard to tell which is worse, most of the time.  Though, in Moonstone's case, I think it was also shipped before it was fully debugged.

[Karlos]

Why do Amiga games crash so offen?

Well, for A500 generation games, here's my top 7 bug bears...

1) Assumptions about OS, memory, CPU, custom chip configuration
2) Direct hardware access
3) Self modifying code
4) Misuse of bits 24-31 in a0-a7 on original 68000(not a common one, this)
5) Dodgy synchronisation techniques, nop etc.
6) Rushed development
7) Incomplete testing

Thankfully most of those issues have gone for more recent games..

[Mad-Matt]

An exaple of some games your having problems with would be helpful if ya looking for a solution.

Its mostly the new ppc games i have problems with random crashing, but thats partly due to the hacky nature of the ppc addon cards :/

for classic games, the WHDLoad system does wonders for making classic games that wernt intended for configuration work from HD. Often the Loaders include fixes for known bugs in a game.

[Tomas]

Sounds like you have a defect amiga then.... Ive never had that problem, except for games not made for my system... but they wouldnt run at all...  :-)

[Methuselas]

Hardware banging was a problem too. In emulation, you can't bang an emulated chip. UAE is good, but it's not perfect.

[alx]

In emulation, you can't bang an emulated chip

Why not?  UAE seems to support virtually everything.  The only real issue for me is in demos and games with fast screenfades - it just cannot keep up.

But of course, things start to get messy when a program bangs what it thinks is OCS when it's AGA - some very old programs have difficulty running on anything apart from an A1000, A500 and A2000.