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EdwardDLetendre

Posted Thu Aug 17, 2017 7:55 am

I have an Amiga 1000 more than likely with only 256 mb ram as I have no memory upgrade on the system.

I did pick up an external scsi hard drive made in Toronto (cannot remember the company right now).

I also have two external floppy drives and a external USB floppy drive.

If I plug in either of the external floppy drives, the disks will read but I then get read errors, no matter what drive I use (original internal floppy drive or the extra external hard drive) after putting the disk such as larry bird vs Dr. J one on one in the external drive first and then the internal drive (read error on disk). I also have a copy of Earl Weaver baseball but I don't know what settings to use in Earl Weaver to get Earl Weaver to work with kick start rom 3.1.

I am very new to the amiga so I am not sure what settings to use to get the extra scsi hard drive with external box and side drive card setup and how to get Earl Weaver running on my Amiga with kick start rom 3.1.

I also have an amiga 1200 possibly with an internal hard drive as well. I also have two floppy disks for PGA tour golf (game disk, players disk and extra addon courses disk) that I want to install but I am not sure how to install on either an amiga 1000 or 1200.

Any info will help me get started.

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Thu Aug 17, 2017 8:26 am

Hi Edward, welcome to Amiga Love! :) I'm also a little bit new at Amiga hardware myself (but I am familiar enough with the platform through using FS-UAE and the AmigaOS-like MorphOS), but I can try to help you out a little bit here.

Firstly, if you have 256MB on an Amiga 1000, that's mighty impressive! :P (I know you meant 256KB; just teasing!)

A lot of older games for the Amiga, as far as I know, have compatibility issues with later versions of Kickstart and Workbench. Most games written with the Amiga 500 or 2000 in mind exhibit these issues. For later Workbench/KS versions, or a machine like an Amiga 4000 or 1200, you can try out WHDload, which will install those games to your hard drive and run them in a contained environment. However, WHDload is tricky to use for beginners; you can ask questions on here or other forums though and generally get some good help.

I don't know much about the Amiga 1000 hardware in itself, but intric8, the admin and site runner, has one, and he can chime in to help you out there.

And also very cool on owning an Amiga 1200. That's the model I really, really would love to get one day! :)

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Aug 17, 2017 10:01 am

Hi Edward - welcome to Amiga Love! Thanks for joining.

You've illustrated a lot of different issues. Let me try and parse some of them as best I understand them.

First of all - on your Amiga 1000 - are you loading a Kickstart 1.3 disk first before doing anything? (and not Kickstart 1.1 or 1.2... 1.3 is the best option)

The process for some games works like this.
1) Turn on your Amiga 1000
2) Wait for the Kickstart Prompt screen
3) Insert your Kickstart Disk (ideally 1.3)
4) Wait
5) You're then offered another prompt to insert your Workbench disk.

Now, this right here is where things get funky. Some really old games were made BITD (back in the day) to be booted in the floppy drive when you turn the machine on (if you had a 500 or 2000, etc.). They won't work if you try and launch them from Workbench. They may even say something like DF0:NDOS under the icon in Workbench. But the 1000 is different. It needs that Kickstart disk first before you can do anything - including using a disk that was meant to be booted when you turn the machine on. It has no Kickstart ROM on the motherboard like all other Amigas, so it needs to be loaded into your machine's RAM.

For some old games on the 1000, when it asks for the Workbench disk that's when you insert the game disk. Off the top of my head (I'm at work) I believe Earl Weaver baseball can indeed be launched from the Workbench screen, though.

So, after you insert your WB disk (step 5) and load that into memory, you then would insert Earl Weaver (finally!).

Now here's the kick in the face. If you only have 256KB of RAM, it's very possible that many games will need more than your machine is currently providing to work at all - the games may simply fail to launch because you're out of RAM. The Amiga 1000 comes with 256KB of RAM, but you've just loaded Kickstart AND Workbench into memory, so you're already playing with a less than full deck by at least 120KB or so.

My Amiga 1000 has 2 RAM expansions. One is a very common expansion of 256KB that fits behind a plastic cover on the front of the machine. My second expansion is .5MB that fits into a port on the right side of the machine. That gives me a total of 1MB. After loading KS and WB, I typically will see that I have about 850KB free.

In other words, I am wondering if your machine is simply running out of memory to read those games.

That'd be my first guess.

I apologize if I'm telling you stuff you already know. You say you're new to the scene so I'm going to assume you need lots of info, not cryptic snippets. So I may give you more than you're looking for...

Now, you also say this:
I also have a copy of Earl Weaver baseball but I don't know what settings to use in Earl Weaver to get Earl Weaver to work with kick start rom 3.1
Are you trying to play Earl Weaver on your 1000? If so, there is a 99.9% chance your 1000 is wanting to run 1.3, not 3.1. Your Amiga 1200, however, is very likely running 3.1.

IIRC, Earl Weaver was created for 1.3 in mind but should work on your 1200. I would have to verify that when I get home. Some of the really old games written back in the 80s do not like 3.1 and just won't work. Don't ask me why, but this is especially true of many games made in the UK (arcade ports are notorious for this as many were rushed to production under insanely unrealistic deadlines with no budget).

Installing Games

Some games came right out of the box with the ability to install to hard drives. They would often each have their own very specific and peculiar ways of doing this. Frankly, some are so strange that if you lack the original installation instructions, you'd likely never figure it out on your own. Then there are some that can simply be copied. Then there are some that actually would have install programs that did everything for you. These usually came from bigger game shops. And then there are many that were never made to be run on a hard drive. But as LambdaCalculus mentioned above, a program (which is very complex) was created where many of these games can be put on a hard drive. But I probably would stick to the basics if you're just getting started and play these as if you're living in 1990 and WHDLoad didn't exist. At least, for now.

In any case, PGA Tour requires a minimum of 512KB of RAM to play, so you can't play it on your 1000 until you source some RAM. (I have an extra front-loader RAM expansion I could sell...)

Here are the instructions. This game apparently writes to the floppy, so you're encouraged to copy your disks and play off the copies. And again, keep in mind that the instructions for 1000 users assume you have more RAM than you do. I have no idea if PGA Tour - as originally written - works OK with 3.1 on your 1200.

Hope this helps, and let us know if you have any other questions.

Cheers - and welcome to the community!

NOTE;
You mention you got a hard drive for your 1000. Can you post a picture of it here, and let me know the brand? That is one component my 1000 is sorely lacking and finding an original solution is very, very difficult. I'd be curious what you've got.





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