User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 12:55 pm

Does the boot up menu allow you to do that or does it go back to the original graphics mode upon reset?
Every time you reboot it forgets your previous boot-up settings. I wish I could force it to remember me (I literally have to mash my mouse and select NTSC almost every single time I turn the 1200 on, which is a bit of a drag. Or, there are those lovely times I simply forget, then WB launches and my screen is all stupid and I have to start over.

Totally bonkers when you consider that 1) the machine was made for the N. American market (it's 120V!) and 2) all the games I want to play (95% of them) were from US game studios. There are a few arcade ports that Ocean made that I make the exception for, and Lemmings of course (and a handful of others) but most everything else came from the US.

Hence, it makes parting with my new 2000 all the more difficult. It really is right up my alley in virtually every aspect except for the sheer size of it, and the fact that it isn't silent. I've really gotten used to silence with my retro computers and consoles.

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 1:08 pm

I'm guessing you have a PAL 1200? Yeah that is a drag to have to do that every time. I thought there was a mod you could do to make it always startup in a certain mode PAL or NTSC as default?

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 1:09 pm

I falsely bought into the B.S. spread on the internet that you needed PAL stuff and that it was impossible to play PAL stuff on NTSC hardware. I mean it can be true for a 1000 and certain 2000's and 500's, but quite a few Amiga's have the ability to switch modes. So I bought a cheap motherboard from England and just put it in my 500 case, ran perfectly fine, no need for crap power converters like the internet also claims. But in the end I learned I didn't really need to buy the board from overseas and the fact is 95% of the games I like to play are NTSC games so it didn't matter anyway. I so wish all of these videos talking about Amiga's and PAL/NTSC stuff would give a little asterisk and clarify the "types" of games where somebody might rather get a full PAL board or a full NTSC board... Because in my case it sure the hell is not what they claim it to be. Also the fact that most NTSC games play on PAL hardware (stretched and ugly - but they play) consistently seems to fool countless people into not realizing how many NTSC games there are.

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 1:10 pm

There's a physical switch you can install. It's just one or two pins on the Agnus that causes the machine to boot up into whatever mode... I think about it from time to time but I never seem to want to do it. It would be nice just to toggle the thing on/off, which many power users all over the world did back in the day.

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 6:06 pm

Shot97 wrote:There's a physical switch you can install. It's just one or two pins on the Agnus that causes the machine to boot up into whatever mode... I think about it from time to time but I never seem to want to do it. It would be nice just to toggle the thing on/off, which many power users all over the world did back in the day.
Yeah that sounds familiar.

I never bought into the hype of PAL because for one thing, I was an Amiga user back in the good old days so the only thing I ever tried to get working correctly that was PAL were demos as I love demos. Most of the PAL demos I had back then played fine on an NTSC Amiga but you might have missed a bit of the scroller if it was limited to the bottom area of the screen and the music played a bit faster then on a PAL machine. It isn't as bad as the C64 Demo scene as most of the PAL demos refuse to work at all on an NTSC because of timing and disk loader routines.

When I was first into Amiga I had only a 500 with 1MB RAM and two drives. Even on the 500, with enough memory you can still run a PAL boot disk that did something making PAL demos run better. I haven't used it in years, since the A1200 support both, so I don't remember the details.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Nov 22, 2016 8:09 am

I just got some really interesting advice from someone about how to switch the default boot from PAL to NTSC. He is a user in North America who ran into the same issue.
Under OS 3.1 and later the PAL chip is nullified and you get to choose the display mode. I deleted all the PAL icons and set it to always boot up to an NTSC Hi-Res screen. Look in your DEVS/Monitors file in the Storage drawer. Many other screen resolutions are available if you drag them to your regular Monitors drawer and reboot. Once set to NTSC Hi-Res it will always stay there. So you can fix yours this way. Watch out for Multiscan Productivity mode, this is what cheap RGB to VGA converters need. The display looks great, but sucks up so much chip and fast RAM it disables most of your software!
I may look into that after the holidays. If this made my 1200 switch its prefs, that would be fantastic.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Nov 22, 2016 8:12 pm

I was checking out a flippin' crazy post on imgur today when I ran across a pretty sweet 3rd-party drive that seems to have come built with an on/off switch. The drive was made by a company called CUMANA, and was really small.

The drive was originally beige. This is a modded one (even the light was changed to blue LED).

The build quality isn't as nice as the Amiga drive, but the tiny footprint combined with the on/off switch makes it a pretty cool option.
Attachments
Cumana-front.png
External CUMANA floppy drive with on/off switch - front

cumana.png
External CUMANA floppy drive with on/off switch - back


User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Wed Nov 23, 2016 3:03 am

The design looks exactly like the one I had, only mine was white, not black. I've been checking Amiga World when I sift through just in case I run across an original advertisement and figure out exactly the one I had. I did come across our Dot-Matrix printer at some point but I think I forgot to take a screenshot! The original died quite a long time ago, which is why I'm stuck on Commodore one, which, at least in my case, I can't stand the noise! But it's so hard for me to get motivated to buy something like that when the one I have works, no matter how obnoxious it is.





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