here's a problem...games won't load from hard drive

[PaperMario]

hey everyone^^
I just bought Amiga 1200 recently(boxed with everything), and I have a couple of questions.
Amiga has 40mb internal hard disk, I've installed couple of games on hd - Brian the Lion, Robocod, I do have originals as well.
whenever I'm trying to run a game(Brian the Lion) from the hard disk, message appears - hdload:btl - not enough memory.
I ran the game from floppies just fine, but no dice from hd.
so I said, ok, maybe robocod, wham! - the same thing.
then I tried hired guns from psygnosis, game has been installed succesfully, but after I chose language(still in workbench) - out of chip memory.
I bought also one of my favorite Amiga games of all times: Pinball Illusions and Slamtilt - but these aren't even booting from floppies!
I mean they do, I got to the main menu, chose a table, and whammo! - got back to the workbench screen(out of mem).
I'm running workbench 3.0, I never have anything opened in the background(I guess), this happens after rebooting the system, it's not like I'm working on the system and then system runs out of memory - I'm talking about right after reboot.
any response would be appreciated,
thanks.

[Piru]

Go to bootmenu, disable all unused partitions (each one takes some memory), and boot without startup-sequence. Then launch the game from the CLI.

If it still fails then I suggest you buy some 030 accelerator (blizzard 1230-IV for example) with some fast memory.

[motorollin]

The difference is that when you load from floppies, (a) you have nothing else loaded and eating memory, and (b) from floppy, the game is loaded little bits at a time.

Piru's suggestions will save you some memory. If you still don't have enough then try disabling the PRELOAD option in the tooltypes of the game or the WHDLoad config file. It will stop WHDLoad from loading the whole game at once, which might allow it to run.

Failing that, Piru is right - you will need at least a RAM card, or better yet an accelerator with RAM on board.

--
moto

[PaperMario]

here's the thing:

I already went to bootmenu, because those games are pal compatible, and otherwise they wouldn't even go as far as menu(pinball illusions, slamtilt).
my amiga 1200 is ntsc, so had to change mode to pal in boot menu.
I went to cli and typed commands, disabled every other device from boot menu except hd partition(the game is on), and game went as far as main menu, then showed up out of memory.
pinball illusions and slamtilt, ran from floppies - same thing, games won't load.
these games were written for amiga 1200, and they should work just fine, not to mention brian the lion, robocod were written for amiga's with 1mb ram and they still are failing to work from hd.
someday I'll buy accelerator for my 1200, but I would like to play right now! ^_~
I will try with whdload, any other posibbilities?

[TjLaZer]

Time for WHDLoad!!!

[PaperMario]

motorroling said:

" If you still don't have enough then try disabling the PRELOAD option in the tooltypes of the game or the WHDLoad config file. It will stop WHDLoad from loading the whole game at once, which might allow it to run."

I couldn't find these files, and therefore I'm still without any working solutions, anyone care to explain where exactly can I find these files?

while trying to get hired guns working from hd, this appears: error #00013 : could not allocate enough of any memory.

I don't know what to do at this point, and would love to play these games, awaiting response.

regards.

[Tomas]

how much free chip ram do you have after WB has fully booted?
It can be something as simple as you running WB with too many colours or something, which use up alot of ram.

[PaperMario]

I was checking my config and this is what config in wb says:

cpu: 68020

custom chips: AA NTSC Alice, AA Lisa

kickstart version 39.106, exec version 39.47, disk version 39.29

ram: node type $A, attributes $703(chip), at $400-$1fffff (~2.0 meg)

after booting my system with workbench:

765, 750 graphics mem, 0 other ram

I'm running this system just as I got it few days ago,
I was thinking about reinstalling workbench(I do have 5 disks, wb 3.0), do you guys think that will help?

[motorollin]

Tomas wrote:
how much free chip ram do you have after WB has fully booted?
It can be something as simple as you running WB with too many colours or something, which use up alot of ram.

Well he said he had the same problem when booted without SS, so I suspect the HD-installed version of the game requires more than 2MB of RAM. PaperMario, how did you install the games? Did you use WHDLoad or something else?

--
moto

[PaperMario]

I actually didn't use whdload or anything like that, just installed them from originals(slamtilt, pinball illusions, hired guns - have their own installers on floppies), brian the lion and robocod were already installed on the system, so I don't know how those were, but I haven't used any other method, how can I use something else than just regular floppy installation method from originals?
I've heard about whdload, but never used it.
and I'm sure slamtilt and pinball illusions only need basic 2 megs and aga chipsets in order to run properly.

[McVenco]

PaperMario wrote:
I'm sure slamtilt and pinball illusions only need basic 2 megs and aga chipsets in order to run properly.

True, when you run it from floppy disk. If you run it from harddisk it throws much more stuff into memory at once.
WHDLoad can be helpful here.

I would also recommend a clean WB install since ~750k Chip RAM free after starting WB is VERY bad, there's probably a lot of junk loaded at startup.

Finally: you should really try to find some extra memory (as stated above). Although a 030 board isn't really necessary, it will give you a lot of pleasure in running your machine. I have got a Blizzard 1220/4 in one of my A1200s, which has 4MB of FastRAM and a 68020 at 28 MHz (there's also room for an FPU), which gives it a very comfortable increase in speed.

[PaperMario]

well that makes me curious - why Slamtilt and Pinball Illusions won't load from my floppy disks then?
I have them them on originals, booting the system with the floppies inside, and everything works - up to the point where I'm selecting a table, then the system asks for changing the disk, and when game supposed to load(either slamtilt or illusions), once again ask me for a 1st disk, and game goes back to wb, saying that system ran out of memory or the tables are missing(which is not posibble), because both games are perfectly fine, even running them both from floppies causes problems with memory which is just mind-blowing ^_~
and I still can't get them to work...

[Piru]

Do you have many partitions? Perhaps each with some extra buffers configured? Each will take some memory, even when booting off floppy, unless if you disable the partitions.

[PaperMario]

here's a list of devices from boot menu:

DF0 priority 5
cc0 priority 3
hd0 priority 1(partition)
rad priority 0
hd1 not bootable(2nd partition)

I don't know what else to tell you guys,

I think there is a lot of junk installed there, and that may be one of the reasons games are not working, is it wise to format everything?

I have only 5 amiga workbench disks(wb 3.0, storage, extras, locale, fonts) - is this a complete package?
I wouldn't want to format everything there is on the system, and stuck without anything because of the floppy missing or something ^_~, heh.

[Piru]

rad priority 0

Here's the culprit. RAD is using the precious chip memory.

Why do you have a RAD disk mounted? To remove it, drag the icon from Devs/DOSDrivers to Storage/DOSDrivers. Wait for couple of seconds, power off, power on and see the amount of free memory grow about 880KB.