WHD Load on an Amiga 1000??

[barney]

I am going to add an 030 accelerator, 1MB external ram and an external hard drive to an Amiga I own.  I know the standard Amiga 1000 only has 512k chip ram, so is this going to limit me in running WHD Load on my Amiga 1000?  Do I need a minimum of 1mb or will 512k work fine?  Thanks.

[tone007]

As far as I know, even 1MB of Chip RAM is a little light for WHDload, I doubt 512KB would let you run much.

[Matt_H]

I think WHDLoad requires Kickstart 2 or higher. Assuming you've got that as well, it'll probably work. Problem is that you'll be limited to games that require very small amounts of RAM - probably just a few releases from 1985-86 before 512k was commonplace. Even though you've got a full 512k, WHDLoad itself takes up some of it, leaving less than that for the game itself. Bottom line, you can probably run things that work on a stock (256k) A1000 and not much else.

[orcish75]

I found out the hard way on my first Amiga, a German A2000 rev 4.0 which has the A1000 chipset on it. It also only has 512k chipmem due to the thin Agnus.

Quite a few WHDLoad games worked fine with 8MB fastram and 512k chipmem but there were also a few games that required more chipmem. I think about 1 in 3 games required more than 512k chipmem.

Cheers

[barney]

I think WHDLoad requires Kickstart 2 or higher. Assuming you've got that as well, it'll probably work. Problem is that you'll be limited to games that require very small amounts of RAM - probably just a few releases from 1985-86 before 512k was commonplace. Even though you've got a full 512k, WHDLoad itself takes up some of it, leaving less than that for the game itself. Bottom line, you can probably run things that work on a stock (256k) A1000 and not much else.

Believe it or not, but I got WHDLoad to run on WB 1.3 on my Amiga 2000.  It works rather nicely.

[barney]

I think WHDLoad requires Kickstart 2 or higher. Assuming you've got that as well, it'll probably work. Problem is that you'll be limited to games that require very small amounts of RAM - probably just a few releases from 1985-86 before 512k was commonplace. Even though you've got a full 512k, WHDLoad itself takes up some of it, leaving less than that for the game itself. Bottom line, you can probably run things that work on a stock (256k) A1000 and not much else.

That limitation is why to this day, I have no idea what non-chip ram is even for.  I always assumed that is 512 isn't enough for a game that requires 1 megabyte, it would dip into the extra ram you installed.  To this day, I am still stinkin confused about this.

[Thorham]

That limitation is why to this day, I have no idea what non-chip ram is even for.  I always assumed that is 512 isn't enough for a game that requires 1 megabyte, it would dip into the extra ram you installed.  To this day, I am still stinkin confused about this.

It's simple: Many games that require one megabyte, need the extra memory, but they only need 512 kilobytes of chipmem.

What's that 512 kilobytes of non-chipmem used for? Everything that doesn't have to be in chipmem, such as program code, level data, the non-sample part of the music, tables, etc. This leaves more chipmem available for graphics and samples, and at the same time you don't need one megabyte of chipmem (and thus you don't need a fat Agnus).

All this leads to games that run on more machines, because all the A500s can have 512 kilobytes of trapdoor memory, but not all of them have a fat Agnus. Also, the ones that do have a fat Agnus have to be modded.

[gaula92]

Believe it or not, but I got WHDLoad to run on WB 1.3 on my Amiga 2000.  It works rather nicely.

How? I have a "special" 1.3 kickstart that can boot from HDD, but I never got Whdload to run from it! Did you do anything special?

[barney]

I've got a tripple rom switcher (1.3, 2.0 and 3.1)  I switch it to 1.3, boot up into workbench 3.1 and run whdload......that it.  Yes believe it or not, workbench 3.1 also runs on kickstart 1.3.

[barney]

I don't mean to beat a dead horse on this Amiga 1000 memory issue but here goes.  If I am running a game (floppy) that only has a 512kb requirement on a machine that has 512kb chip ram and 8mb fast ram, will the Amiga take advantage of the extra memory or will it ignore it and only use the 512 chip ram?  Just seeing if I will get any type of system performance / boost by installing fast ram.

[Matt_H]

I don't mean to beat a dead horse on this Amiga 1000 memory issue but here goes.  If I am running a game (floppy) that only has a 512kb requirement on a machine that has 512kb chip ram and 8mb fast ram, will the Amiga take advantage of the extra memory or will it ignore it and only use the 512 chip ram?  Just seeing if I will get any type of system performance / boost by installing fast ram.

Depends on the game. Some games take advantage of additional memory, some don't.

[barney]

Depends on the game. Some games take advantage of additional memory, some don't.

In other words, if it's a typical 512kb game that doesn't take advantage of additional memory, then any installed Fast Ram is good as useless.  That is what I was trying to figure out.  I assumed that even though a game may not "take advantage" of additional memory, it may still help out in some invisible, "in the background" way.  Thanks.