[M31]

I bought an Amiga A500 bundle off Ebay that arrived today, bought it because it was my first ever computer over 20 years ago and I felt like some nostalgia.

The machine came with a few game titles but now I seem to re-call it needed some sort of OS disks to start it (it has no hard drive of course) but I cant remember if you need these disks all the time at start up ... have got a signal from it on a TV, and the prompt is showing put a floppy in the drive, so tried one of the game floppys and nothing ... I honestly cant remember how it all worked! needless to say the machine came with no manual.

I should have asked about this before buying, have asked the seller since, who has ignored my questions ... he only communicated to ask an extra £6 for delivery to my area, even after paying the extra he's still ignored my questions

I have ordered an Amiga 500 book guide from ebay that should be here in a few days, but in the small chance anyone here is familiar with these computers, maybe they can advise or point me in the right direction just now?

I seem to re-call when I bought my original one brand new 20 years ago having to insert some sort of OS disk to boot it, but cant remember if that was just needed once to write data to a rom chip or something?

Never got any OS disks of any description with the bundle, just a few games. The seller described it as working.

Cheers.

[GrofLuigi]

The game disks should be bootable.

The Kickstart (ROM) disk was needed only for very early A1000 models.

GL

*Edit (clarification): I'm pretty sure the Kickstart is onboard (in a chip) on ALL A500 models.

This post has been edited by GrofLuigi: 01 March 2010 - 05:04 PM

[M31]

GrofLuigi, on 01 March 2010 - 05:02 PM, said:

The game disks should be bootable.

You sure about that?

Quote

The Kickstart (ROM) disk was needed only for very early A1000 models.

GL

*Edit (clarification): I'm pretty sure the Kickstart is onboard (in a chip) on ALL A500 models.

This is an A500 model ... I've never heard of an Amiga A1000, though I'm sure it exists?

I'm still diagnosing, but it looks like a bummer of an impulse buy here, the Amiga A500 guide book I've ordered has just dropped through the door, hopefully that will shed some light.

Thanks anyway.

[jaclaz]

The actual kickstart on the 500 was in ROM, think at it like you would to a BIOS on a PC.
http://en.wikipedia....ickstart_(Amiga)

Actually there is a second part of the OS, the Workbench, which is a floppy with the Amiga OS, think at it like you would to a DOS diskette on a PC with no hard disk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS

In reality there is not such a neat division as in the PC world, where BIOS and OS are competely divided, just in oldish Macintosh, part of the OS is actually in the ROM (kickstart) and partially in the diskettes (Workbench).

Once the kickstart asks for a diskette, if you have a bootable diskette (including a game one) it should boot allright, but it is possible that either the diskette or the drive is dirty, damaged or both.

You may want to try an emulator to get the "feeling" of it, and remember the long time past days....
http://www.winuae.net/
http://www.tweakguid...om/Amiga_1.html

If you want a quick look at the Workbench, you can use this java thingy:
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
http://www.chromeexp...hiptunecom-gui/

jaclaz

[Martin H]

Ahh, Amiga - the memmories...

That was also my first computer, but didn't used it much for gaming, and i remember trying hard to learn programking assembly language on it(but it was to hard for me, 13 years old about..)

Anyway, just wanted to throw in that if your model is Amiga 500+, the one with built-in 1mb instead of 512kb and kikstart 2.0 instead of 1.3, then many games didn't worked, as they werent compatible with kickstart 2.0 and hence, instead of adding a kickstart switcher + kickstart 1.3 in hardware, then there where a floppy-disk that could be loaded before the game which then stayed resident in RAM and would run a big number of the kickstart 1.3 only games...

Maybe that is your issue, i dunno... If not, then as jaclaz said, it's probably a damaged disc or a unbootable one...

Most Amiga games could nut even be run from workbench, as they'ed show up as NDOS disks, since they used internal routines for everything including disklayout/sector-loading and not the OS API functions

[jaclaz]

Martin H, on 02 March 2010 - 08:27 AM, said:

That was also my first computer, but didn't used it much for gaming, and i remember trying hard to learn programking assembly language on it(but it was to hard for me, 13 years old about..)

That's the sad part (for me).

This is how my first computer looked like:
http://home.micros.u.../zx80/zx80.html
http://home.micros.u...al_zx80_kit.jpg
and I was way older than 13 when I assembled it.



jaclaz

[03GrandAmGT]

Yes you need a bootable disk. Even though you have the Kickstart (Bios) the actual OS is still needed. If you look around the net you can usually find a good buy on the OS and ROM chips. I realize this doesn't help now but there really is no other way. I still have My original C=64, A1000, A2000, A500 and they still work and get used. Once you find yourself the disks you need there was a way of copying the needed required OS files and putting them on the game disk if there was room. There are a few Amiga groups over at the Yahoo area.

jd

[GrofLuigi]

03GrandAmGT, in theory yes, but any self-respecting game (read: good games ) employed a custom loader (on the bootsector or otherwise). And since he received supposedly working diskettes... I'm afraid something's wrong there - let's hope it's just the diskettes.

GL

Edit: Now I've seen Martin's reply... I don't remember such a thing. If a game worked from diskettes, it would work on any model I've tried it on (many A500's, A1200, some A2000's (older models of those were problematic, granted)).

This post has been edited by GrofLuigi: 02 March 2010 - 10:42 AM

[Martin H]

It was a public-domain disc which emulated kickstart 1.3 support for amiga 500+(that model wasen't that widelly used either...)

@03GrandAmGT

Amiga games dosen't need workbench to be pre-loaded by the user before-hand... not even the "standard-compliant" ones..

This post has been edited by Martin H: 02 March 2010 - 01:20 PM

[GrofLuigi]

Martin H, on 02 March 2010 - 01:19 PM, said:

It was a public-domain disc which emulated kickstart 1.3 support for amiga 500+(that model wasen't that widelly used either...)

Oh yeah... softload a Kickstart 1.3 on 2.0 machine... I miss that feature on today's BIOS's.

GL

[jaclaz]

GrofLuigi, on 02 March 2010 - 03:26 PM, said:

Oh yeah... softload a Kickstart 1.3 on 2.0 machine... I miss that feature on today's BIOS's.

OT , but not much :
http://rayer.ic.cz/romos/romose.htm


There also was another interesting project called aebios which is seemingly now on hold/abandoned.


jaclaz

[03GrandAmGT]

Well I know unless my systems had a boot-able hard drive or the game the floppy was on had (I forget) 1 or 2 OS (V1.3 & 2.0) files all you would get was the boot bios screen showing the animation of inserting a disk. You still need to have some way of booting from the Kickstart window. The term I should have used earlier was the game floppy needed to have been formatted with the install command, which put a Boot Block on the floppy. Essentially the same as the dos command of sys c: or a:

Been awhile since I have used any dos PC or Amiga.
Wiki on Amiga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

jd
Need to get back on my Amigas.

[GrofLuigi]

03GrandAmGT, on 02 March 2010 - 06:08 PM, said:

Need to get back on my Amigas.

I just had to... WinUAE's screenshot didn't come out right, but who cares... And BTW I can't remember what half of the programs are (and those are only prefs)

GL

[M31]

GrofLuigi, on 01 March 2010 - 05:02 PM, said:

The game disks should be bootable.

You were right, today I tried the Amiga 500 again with the same Game floppy disk (FA 18 Interceptor) and it booted and worked fine, I've got some workbench Amiga 2.05 workbench disks coming from Ebay soon though, also ordered a 1/2 meg ram upgrade for the machine just as I did for my original 20 years ago, but after reading the Amiga 500 guide book I bought, this one is an Amiga 500+ that already comes with 1MB ram apparently? I'm now watching for a second external floppy to make life easier for disk change and copying as I did 20 years ago and also a joystick, and I'll be happy with that.

How would I connect the Amiga to a modern LCD monitor? I watched a vid on You tube of a guy running one on his Dell 30" LCD, mine is a 24" Dell version with the same choice of inputs, just now I'm using the TV modulator through an old CRT TV.

Not sure how long this nostalgia trip will last, but its quite cute compared to what I own now PC wise

Thanks to all who have helped.

[M31]

Martin H, on 02 March 2010 - 08:27 AM, said:

Anyway, just wanted to throw in that if your model is Amiga 500+, the one with built-in 1mb instead of 512kb and kikstart 2.0 instead of 1.3, then many games didn't worked, as they werent compatible with kickstart 2.0 and hence, instead of adding a kickstart switcher + kickstart 1.3 in hardware, then there where a floppy-disk that could be loaded before the game which then stayed resident in RAM and would run a big number of the kickstart 1.3 only games...

This is quite fun re-learning the Amiga all over again, my original 20 years ago machine was an Amiga 500 that I added an extra 1/2 MB ram to give me 1MB ram that some games I played back then needed, I've now discovered the Amiga I've just bought is in fact an Amiga A500+ that apparently has 1MB of ram from stock (1MB ... LOL, this machine I'm typing on has 6GB of ram) and I already bought a 1/2 MB expansion from Ebay for it ... DoH!

When I tried the Amiga today it does show Kickstart 2.0 so I guess I'll need to source one of these floppy disks that can boot the Amiga into Kickstart 1.3 for compatibility ... hopefully I'll find one on Ebay.

Thanks.

This post has been edited by M31: 05 March 2010 - 10:11 AM

[Martin H]

Relokick 1.4a ©1994 Galahad of Fairlight: http://cd.textfiles....es/wb/relokick/

About ReloKick v1.4 from another page:

Quote

Commodore Amiga Relokick 1.4 disk. This degrades the Amiga 500+/600/1200/4000 to the original Amiga 500 Kickstart 1.3. Now lots of older games & demos which didn't work before will work. The 3.5" double density disk is supplied with a plastic case.

This post has been edited by Martin H: 07 March 2010 - 02:26 PM

[M31]

Martin H, on 07 March 2010 - 02:20 PM, said:

Relokick 1.4a ©1994 Galahad of Fairlight: http://cd.textfiles....es/wb/relokick/

About ReloKick v1.4 from another page:

Quote

Commodore Amiga Relokick 1.4 disk. This degrades the Amiga 500+/600/1200/4000 to the original Amiga 500 Kickstart 1.3. Now lots of older games & demos which didn't work before will work. The 3.5" double density disk is supplied with a plastic case.

Thanks.