help please

[sargeantinio]

hi guys
i now have aan amiga a600 ,problem is it doesnt come up with the purple screen with disk going into drive
instead it goes to workbench screen
how do i change this?
also it loads all my games ok exept all my champ manager gameswhich i have loads of
wondered if there was any connection ,it gets most of the way through disk 1 then crashes
but i know these games work ok
any help is appreciated thanks

[Thomas]

it doesnt come up with the purple screen with disk going into drive
instead it goes to workbench screen
how do i change this?

Open the case and remove the harddrive.

[sargeantinio]

could you be more specific please, im no expert

[TiredOLife]

Why would you want to stop it booting to Workbench?
What games exactly?
Do you have extra ram installed?

[J-Golden]

First off, welcome to the wonderful world of AMIGA!

The reason you do not get the purple "insert Disk" screen is that you have a hard drive in your A600.  This isn't a bad thing, by the way nor is it a malfunction.

If you don't want the Hard Drive to load, you can either insert a disk at startup.  This will attempt to load the disk information instead of booting from the hard drive.  This does not disable the Hard Drive so it will be running in the background and is accessible.

Also, you can hold down both mouse buttons at startup.  This will bring up the early startup menu where you can choose to disable the Hard Drive.  Do a soft reset and now you will get the purple "insert disk" screen.  You will continue to get this until you power off the A600 and start it again (hard reset).  The down side is that you now have no access to the Hard Drive if you needed to load files from it.

Hope this helps you out

[J-Golden]

Oh right!  Champ Manager issues.

Could you be more specific on what happens when it crashes?

You said you have a lot of this game.  Do you get the exact same error no matter which disk you use?

If you are getting the exact same problem every time, the issue could be one of the following:

- The A600 is PAL and the game is NTSC (or other way around)

If you look at the disk, they usually say what region the game is in.  If the Keyboard on the A600 is anything other than the standard English format, it is very likely a PAL system.

If this is your problem, you will need a program that will temporarily change your system into the format you need.  Two that I know of are Degrader and Re-Lo Kick.  They are mainly used to get by issues using older games on newer systems, but they also have the ability to do what you need.

- The game requires more memory then you have available.

If you try to load the game after disabling the Hard Drive (mentioned in my previous post) and then it works, it is a memory issue.  To Mount and access the Hard Drive uses memory and sometimes that is the culprit.

The Hard Drive check is the easiest to do so I would try that first.

Let us know what you find out!:)

[sargeantinio]

well that sounds helpful ,it is failing at same point each time and it does keep saying not enough memory
when i held both mouse buttons down it brought up these options
df0
cc0
dh0
dh2
dh1
which one helps me disable hard drive?

[sargeantinio]

oh and it also says advaced options below these:)

[Franko]

Dh0...

[sargeantinio]

well that didnt change anything do i need to mess with advaced options first ??

[J-Golden]

well that didnt change anything do i need to mess with advaced options first ??

Hmmm, try disabling ALL the drive except DF0: (Disk-Floppy-0 meaning the first floppy)
 
Since it is looking like you are mounting several partitions (DH0-2 and maybe even CC0) you will want to disable ALL of them as each one will take up a bit of memory, IIRC.
 
GOOD LUCK!
 
PS- Advance Options are for other things that you may want to look up on the web and get more info on before you mess around with them.

[sargeantinio]

ok ive disabled evthing except df0 now it's asking me to insert volume df0 in any drive

[J-Golden]

Hmm, ok, then just reactivate CC0 and see what it does.

If that doesn't help, go ahead and restart the A600 with all Hard Drives active and no floppy inserted in the drive.  Let workbench load up.  Left click anywhere on the screen and this should pull up your memory stats across the top.

You will two different types of memory listed; Graphics and Other.  List what you have here and we can go from there.

[sargeantinio]

right ok
graphics memory 734640
other is 0 memory

[Franko]

ok ive disabled evthing except df0 now it's asking me to insert volume df0 in any drive

If you're getting that message then it looks like the floppy disk drive is either broken/ faulty or the cables for it (power and data) may not be connected up properly...

If I were you I would open it up and check the floppies cabling to find out if the floppy drive is actually working or not...

I notice from your first post you mention that it does read disks but with errors occurring, this could be (it does happen) down to the small pin switches at the front opening of the floppy drive being dirty...

Sometimes when these disk detection switches get dirty they become intermittent and the vibrations when reading a disk is enough for the switch to lose contact resulting in errors...

A little squirt of contact cleaner or WD40 on these switches and pressing and releasing them numerous times is usually all it takes to fix this problem...