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So last week a friend offered me a Commodore 64 knowing I collected old poo poo. I turned it down because honestly I don't even know what is worth playing on it that is exclusive to the system plus my partner would kill me. I'm sorry thread. maybe I'll just get it anyways 
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May 21, 2014 02:08
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flyboi posted:So last week a friend offered me a Commodore 64 knowing I collected old poo poo. I turned it down because honestly I don't even know what is worth playing on it that is exclusive to the system plus my partner would kill me. If you look at my posts in this thread I talk a lot about C64 games and what I think is worth playing from an action/arcade gamer's perspective. Basically if you're into that sort of thing your life will revolve around mostly finding NTSC releases of European games because that's the good poo poo. The good news is C64 stuff is really cheap compared to other stuff right now. Take the C64, it's been a really fun and rewarding system to get into and it's awesome seeing what developers can do with it. EDIT: This is an excellent list of great C64 games. Some of these might have different titles in the US or might not have been released at all. In Europe games were mostly released on cassette tape while in the US we got them on 5 1/4 floppy disks. You definitely need a good working 1541 (or compatible clone) disk drive to enjoy the NTSC C64, or just get one of the many drive emulators and load up an SD card full of games. I go the 1541 route because I'm crazy. d0s fucked around with this message at 08:41 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 08:34
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As my original Spectrum+ is hidden in an attic many miles away I decided to buy one locally and relive 1980's gaming as I remembered it. However the though of waiting upwards of half-an-hour for games to load wasn't quite as appealing as it had been when I was seven. Luckily a solution exists. Whilst purist will argue that it's technically an Amstrad and not a real Sinclair, I decided to put utility ahead of purity and am now the proud owner of this:   As you can see it comes with a built in floppy disc drive (handily labelled as such) that meant even Starglider would load within sixty seconds. Obviously being built by Amstrad meant there were a few cost saving measures. Namely that the floppy disc drive didn't use normal 3.5" disks, rather it used the 3" format that Amstrad included in the CPC and PCW. Note that the 3" name refers to the size of the actual magnetic disk, the housing for it is almost as large (and twice as thick) as a 3.5" disk. For comparison I've included a 2.8" FDS disk which I'm sure you're all familiar with:  This format provided a massive 173K per side and yes, you had to manually flip the disk. Think of it as a form of exercise. Strangely you can still buy sealed boxes of these disks and - thus far - every single one I've tried has worked. The spinning bit is protected by a metal cover that's only withdrawn once the disk is within the drive. The drive itself has had a new belt put in, but is otherwise original. In your face purveyors of quality products, Amstrad's cheap rubbish will out last you all. The big advantage of the drive was that you could load and play 128K games without having to plan days ahead (128K Starglider took over thirty minutes to load from tape). Like all 128K Spectrums the +3 contained the AY3-8912 sound chip as used in the Atari ST. This allowed for actual music rather than just beeps and meant that the sound came out the TV rather than the internal speaker. It also has a Péritel RGB output - Péritel being French for SCART. The only minor issue is that thanks to overscan it outputs at the not entirely standard 285p50 picture. This caused my XRGB mini no end of annoyance. Luckily I had an old SLG-in-a-box in a draw and that was able to convert the image in to something modern TVs can actually display. Though it was only popular in the UK and Europe, the Speccy has a colossal library of games. Towards the end of its life - which was when the +3 was released - these were usually ports of 16 bit titles. Despite its lack of processing power the old Speccy does a sterling job in most cases. Managing everything from wide roaming action RPGs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2jaALY21U), wire frame 3D (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTupmrSdNZw) and even some shaded 3D titles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=379NxUa7GoU). Not bad for something with a 1Mhz CPU and precisely no hardware graphical aids (not even sprites).
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May 23, 2014 21:04
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d34dm34t posted:I decided to put utility ahead of purity and am now the proud owner of this: I'm in the US and we never got to do the whole Spectrum thing here, a lot of American retro fans kinda side eye the British love for it because of the... unique look of the games. I'm pretty guilty of that too but drat if I'm not a little jealous. Can you hook up a tape drive and play all the normal Spectrum games? What were C64 vs Spectrum playground arguments like?
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May 24, 2014 01:12
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d0s posted:I'm in the US and we never got to do the whole Spectrum thing here, a lot of American retro fans kinda side eye the British love for it because of the... unique look of the games. I'm pretty guilty of that too but drat if I'm not a little jealous. Can you hook up a tape drive and play all the normal Spectrum games? What were C64 vs Spectrum playground arguments like? It has an audio jack on the back that can connect to the usual 1980's tape deck. By copying .wav versions of the old games on to my iPad I can load in tape games such as the peerless 3D Death Chase (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f43PtSV7SAQ). The loading times weren't that bad for the 16 and 48K games. It was only with the late generation titles, which were often 128K and required multiload, that it became almost unbearable without a disc drive. As with all things involving childhood rivalries, the three way battle between Spectrum, C64 and CPC owners was as vicious as it was unceasing. I imagine similar arguments existed in the US between the various C64, CoCo, Atari and Apple tribes. The cheapness of the Spectrum meant it was always the most popular. But with hindsight the C64 was clearly the more sophisticated machine - its total inability to do any kind of 3D not withstanding - though I would never have admitted that as a ten year old. The CPC was never really a contender and despite being a very capable machine, mostly got cheap Spectrum ports. For me the Spectrum is 1980's British computing. So many weird and wonderful games that sold for two pounds at newsagents; inspiring a generation to ignore proper STEM subjects and become computer scientists instead.
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May 24, 2014 11:59
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d34dm34t posted:I imagine similar arguments existed in the US between the various C64, CoCo, Atari and Apple tribes. Computer gaming really wasn't a "thing" among kids here in the 80's the way it was in Europe. It went on, sure but I think it was seen as maybe a bit nerdy and was not really hugely talked about the way, say, the NES was until PC/Windows gaming got big. I had one friend back then with a computer of his own and he was super rich, it was an Apple II and I would go there to use print shop to make stupid signs for my room and play Choplifter. But EVERYONE had a NES or some console, which is how I imgine things were in Europe only with Speccy/C64/CPC/BBC/Acorn/etc EDIT: Finally got a real "tank" mouse for my A500, I'd been using the incredibly lovely and cheap feeling Escom one that came with my 1200. You'd think switching to a mouse over 10 years older would be a downgrade but nope, this one seems to track even better and just feels "right" in stuff like Cannon Fodder. Computer companies really did not gently caress around when they were building mice back then.  EDIT2: Just noticed the irony of the "optical" mousepad 
d0s fucked around with this message at 02:49 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 02:34
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d0s posted:Computer gaming really wasn't a "thing" among kids here in the 80's the way it was in Europe. It went on, sure but I think it was seen as maybe a bit nerdy and was not really hugely talked about the way, say, the NES was until PC/Windows gaming got big. Yeah, this is how I remember through the early to mid '90s, here in the US. Kids knew there were computer games, but gently caress if they could name any franchises off the top of their heads, and most computers just seemed dull or inferior. To be fair, since computers weren't as powerful or ubiquitous back then, the exposure to computers that most kids received would have been solely in an educational context. And those computers would likely have been Apple IIs (most of which couldn't hold a candle graphically to the NES, SNES, or Genesis), some restricted Mac running Easy Access, or very likely older IBM PCs running boring programs on graphically unimpressive yellow/orange/green/monochrome/CGA displays. I remember seeing a snippet on USA Today way, way back then that blurbed about how PC gaming was becoming the new hotness, and (based on my knowledge and conception of computers back then) wondering how the hell that could be. I don't think PC gaming became a real thing to me until I heard about Doom on an NPR profile about Id Software and then saw it in action. And suddenly, it seemed like "Holy poo poo, this is some amazing techno wizardry!"; all those colors, the sound, the violence and blood and whatnot.
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May 25, 2014 03:42
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I'm pretty sure the C64 was really popular here in the tiny market for games computers but I think if it had been marketed differently/had more of the excellent European games ported over to NTSC it could have become a lot more popular and expanded that market, a lot of the stuff I'm playing on it really gets almost NES-level in quality. I think Commodore US was really focusing on it's value as an educational/simple business machine because that's what the American computer market seemed to want. I did not even know the C64 existed until I was almost a teenager and getting into old computers as a hobby, and I was a very game-obsessed kid.
d0s fucked around with this message at 05:48 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 05:45
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d0s posted:I'm pretty sure the C64 was really popular here in the tiny market for games computers but I think if it had been marketed differently/had more of the excellent European games ported over to NTSC it could have become a lot more popular and expanded that market, a lot of the stuff I'm playing on it really gets almost NES-level in quality. I think Commodore US was really focusing on it's value as an educational/simple business machine because that's what the American computer market seemed to want. I did not even know the C64 existed until I was almost a teenager and getting into old computers as a hobby, and I was a very game-obsessed kid. It had some weird side-markets in the US. Some state U systems invested heavily in C64s on the educational/simple business machine premise back in the early 80s which led to those states having robust surplus C64 markets by the late 80s and well into the early 90s. As an RPG platform, triple-A titles like the Gold Box SSI games were still being released for it that late as well. These things were cheaper than a NES and the software library was huge and cheap (even before figuring in rampant piracy.)
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May 25, 2014 14:03
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d0s posted:I'm pretty sure the C64 was really popular here in the tiny market for games computers but I think if it had been marketed differently/had more of the excellent European games ported over to NTSC it could have become a lot more popular and expanded that market, a lot of the stuff I'm playing on it really gets almost NES-level in quality. I think Commodore US was really focusing on it's value as an educational/simple business machine because that's what the American computer market seemed to want. I did not even know the C64 existed until I was almost a teenager and getting into old computers as a hobby, and I was a very game-obsessed kid. C64 was really popular in general; it pretty much dominated the low-end computer market in the early to mid-80s. It was cheaper than the high-ends (Apple II, IBM PC) and more powerful than the other low-ends. (TRS-80, Atari 400/800) It was pretty much explicitly targeted as a low-end consumer machine though. For education Apple already had a stranglehold on the market. It had even less of a presence or marketing in the business sector--in addition to being markedly slower than the high-ends which already had a presence, it had a near complete lack of good productivity software. It didn't even have Visicalc, the killer business app that was mostly used on Apple II until Lotus 1-2-3 crushed it summarily and cemented the IBM PC as the business computer. The C64's low price point got it some hefty presence in the consumer market though, and since consumers are the ones that game, that's where the games went. But yeah in the 80s there was basically no platform wars in the schoolyard really. If you even had a computer it was pretty rare, and it was almost unheard of for the kids to have their own computer. (Me and my brother got lucky when we got a cheap C64 at a yard sale later in the 80s in that sense) I don't think it really started kicking into earnest until the 16-bit era when it was a competition between the 286/386 and the Amiga and computers became a little more commonplace.
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May 25, 2014 15:15
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My parents had a Commodore 128 when I was growing up. I don't think we had that many legit games on it, mostly copies made with the Maverick program... which was a copied version. My dad was a terrible, terrible person.
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May 25, 2014 17:54
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Randalor posted:My parents had a Commodore 128 when I was growing up. I don't think we had that many legit games on it, mostly copies made with the Maverick program... which was a copied version. My dad was a terrible, terrible person. drat near everything back then was pirated, which is funny when you consider the decidedly low-tech methods of doing so. I never figured out where it came from myself at the time--most of the software that came with the C64 when we got it was pirated but besides that all my stuff was legit because I didn't know how to get it otherwise. In retrospect it was worth it though for the boxes and manuals alone.
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May 25, 2014 21:26
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I was part of a friend trifecta with one of each of us covering Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and Apple II. We certainly spent a fair amount of time telling each other that the other guy's system sucked, but yeah there was no overarching narrative we could point to to prove our point, it was just our individual opinions because none of us knew anyone else who had one of those three. Though both my Atari and my buddy's Apple fandom would occasionally acknowledge the Commodore 64's superior game library. Even if we would cling ferociously to the tiny handful of games that were better on our system and THEREFORE PROVED OUR SYSTEM WAS SUPERIOR Look man, until you watch the Rescue On Fractalus intro on an Atari 8-bit computer, you have truly not experienced the overwhelming power of 1985 computer games
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May 27, 2014 04:34
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In general everyone had Commodore 64/128s in my area. There were like 5-6 people I knew with them including me. Two assholes, my friend who was also kind of an rear end in a top hat, his friend who was creepy in hindsight but not really an rear end in a top hat, and a couple other people of largely douchey dispositions. A single Atari ST, one Color Computer, two VIC 20s, three Amigas (including me like a month before High School ended..), one Coleco Adam, one TI 99 a dude got from a Yard Sale, my cousin who had an Aquarius, and one CGA XT Franklin DOS PC with double floppy drives and DOS 3.3. In general we were C64 people up here in Southeastern Connecticut. Apple 2es were in school, and my Votech electronics shop got Mac SEs with Dual floppy drives but in general the 80s were not exactly a time everyone or even a decent percentage of families had a home computer. I have still NEVER actually seen an Atari 8 bit, Atari ST, Macintosh, TRS 80, or Apple 2 outside of a school environment. People just didn't own them. And B Dalton Software Ect carried computer games well into the early 90s. Hell, I knew the NES wasn't my main squeeze the second I saw the Activision Transformers C64 game at Toys R Us! I think one of the last Amiga games I bought was Madden Football at an Illinois Software Ect. Though by this time they were starting to carry console titles and little did I know the writing was on the wall. And the future was Gamestop. (Who pretty much bought everyone else out over the years and took over. They still remain in the Crystal Mall in pretty much the same hallowed spot I bought Ultima 1 way back in Feb/March 1988.) Captain Rufus fucked around with this message at 11:27 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 11:25
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Captain Rufus posted:In general everyone had Commodore 64/128s in my area. There were like 5-6 people I knew with them including me. Two assholes, my friend who was also kind of an rear end in a top hat, his friend who was creepy in hindsight but not really an rear end in a top hat, and a couple other people of largely douchey dispositions. Wait, seriously? Never? What kind of area did you grow up in that lots of people had computers but they were all C64s? Because while the C64 was the best computer in the 80s for gaming, it was really lackluster at everything else--even the Atari 8-bit beat it out in terms of productivity software and being programmable, to say nothing of the IBMs and Apples. Most of the time where I was growing up computers were a thing that parents bought to take their work home and maybe if the kids were lucky they got to play on it. For that reason the dominant computers were the IBM PC and Apple since that's what parents used at work, with Atari 8-bits and TRS-80s occasionally. I can only think of two other kids other than myself that had a C64. Though this is the mostly white-collar Philly burbs we're talking about so that will skew things--in more mixed and blue-collar areas I can definitely see the C64 dominating, but not to that extent. Macs though, those were definitely since they weren't big outside of any segment but the desktop publishing market, and the OS in the early models was too much of a resource hog. By the time they got competitive spec-wise it was too late, and the market was completely dominated by the 386/486. (outside of the aforementioned desktop publishing/high-end graphics stuff)
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May 27, 2014 16:05
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Captain Rufus posted:In general everyone had Commodore 64/128s in my area. There were like 5-6 people I knew with them including me. Two assholes, my friend who was also kind of an rear end in a top hat, his friend who was creepy in hindsight but not really an rear end in a top hat, and a couple other people of largely douchey dispositions. Please don't be mean rufus 
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May 27, 2014 23:43
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d0s posted:Please don't be mean rufus At least where I grew up, the kids with computers tended to be douches because they also tended to come from entitled rich families, given the absurd cost of the things in the 80s. The least douchey of the ones I knew had an Atari 8-bit and a C64. The biggest douche in class had an IBM.
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May 28, 2014 00:05
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Genpei Turtle posted:At least where I grew up, the kids with computers tended to be douches because they also tended to come from entitled rich families, given the absurd cost of the things in the 80s. The least douchey of the ones I knew had an Atari 8-bit and a C64. The biggest douche in class had an IBM. I guess I got lucky, the one kid I knew with a computer (Apple II) was pretty rich but he wasn't a jerk about it or anything, he was actually really cool about letting people use it and even taught me simple DOS 3.3 file operations and BASIC/Logo stuff. EDIT: Thinking about it this along with the Apple IIs at school at the time is what made me originally get into computers, I remember asking for one at the time (being like 8 and having no idea what they cost) and my parents were like HAHA NO. I don't think either I or they had any idea there was a tier below "very expensive" for computers (C64, Atari, etc). Later I up getting an IBM 286 my dad scavenged from his office, but this was when 3/486es were already the hot thing, not all IBM people were rich! d0s fucked around with this message at 01:09 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 00:55
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d0s posted:I guess I got lucky, the one kid I knew with a computer (Apple II) was pretty rich but he wasn't a jerk about it or anything, he was actually really cool about letting people use it and even taught me simple DOS 3.3 file operations and BASIC/Logo stuff. Er...you weren't from the Philly burbs were you? 'Cause I was an Apple II-owning kid that taught a lot of other kids how to program in BASIC/Logo. (though I think I was the poorest one in my lovely rich kid school so probably not) Though mostly I think I taught them how to get the computer to display obscenities. (case in point--while going through the old disks I had on the IIgs, I came across this game I programmed)   (I was a weird kid, and one that apparently couldn't spell. Hope I can find my hacked pornographic version of Chivalry.) I always think of the 386s as more of an early-90s (1992ish) computer, even though I know they came out in the mid-80s. I'm thinking about more like when I was in third-gradeish (so like...1983? 1984?) when 286s were ludicrously expensive and on the IBM side it was the 8088s that were big. And hey dad-computer-scavenging buddy, that's how I got most of mine.   That Apple IIgs I posted earlier in the thread was something my dad scavenged somewhere and has been sitting on for 20 years. Dude knew where to look for computer stuff.
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May 28, 2014 02:03
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Genpei Turtle posted:Er...you weren't from the Philly burbs were you? 'Cause I was an Apple II-owning kid that taught a lot of other kids how to program in BASIC/Logo. (though I think I was the poorest one in my lovely rich kid school so probably not) Though mostly I think I taught them how to get the computer to display obscenities. (case in point--while going through the old disks I had on the IIgs, I came across this game I programmed) Nope, Queens NYC. I was born in 1983, the Apple II stuff happened in the late 80's/early 90's, the 286 came a bit later and I used that until 1995(!) when Pentium class machines became affordable. EDIT: Looking back now it's obvious so many better machines existed at the time than the Apple II, and we probably could have found a used one cheap, but back then lots of people who weren't already hobbyists just didn't know this stuff. To me as a little kid, the only computer I was exposed to was the Apple II, so that's what "a computer" was to me. I asked for an Apple, my parents probably looked at the Consumers/Service Merchandise or whatever catalog at the brand new Apple macs and came to the conclusion that was very expensive. I do remember at this time being invited to another kid's house and his father had what I now realize was a NeXT cube. We weren't allowed to touch it, but we could sit there and watch as he did totally mundane poo poo with it and it was so mindblowing. He had some kind of screen saver that simulated lightning and we watched it for five minutes 
d0s fucked around with this message at 02:33 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 02:11
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I haven't had much time or happy joy brain to get more poo poo done with my Atari 800 and its gaggle of games. But I got a couple cheap DOS CDROMs this week somehow:  Empire II with both manual/booklets. Its more or less a 1995 Wargame Construction Set which means I need to figure out how to draw n stuff so I can like make a Warhammer 40K tileset for it.  And Stonekeep with CD case manual and the hardback book. No fancypants box but like 12 bucks shipped for both is good times. I have an Atari ST game boxed on its way here in spite of not having an ST. But it has one of the best game covers EVER and was cheap. (And I can play it in STEEM, SSE version and have no guilt.) I just need its sequel and the other ST game I was looking for in a cheapie DOS collection with its mostly shite CGA game graphics. Well, one of two cheapie collections or something. Its complicated. My Atari 800 still needs a BASIC cartridge so I can properly use it and test out the disk drive and tape drive. I have just been kinda cheap. Also have to get new front tires and those aren't cheap. Oh yeah, GBS has a Commodore 64 thread. Sadly none of those folks came here to talk in spite of me pimping up the thread. :failure:
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May 30, 2014 09:02
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The only Apple ][ I ever saw as a kid belonged to a school, and not even my school; I saw it at some open day event running a maze game. But then I'm in the UK, and Apples were stupidly expensive over here - the Ł price was probably the same as you'd pay for an Apple laptop now, and that was in 1982 money. ZX Spectrums, C64s and BBC Micros, though: no shortage of those. Probably half the boys in my year had one of the triumverate circa 1983/4, along with the odd Oric, Electron and even one idiot with a TI99/4a (me, until I switched to a 48k Spectrum).
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May 30, 2014 09:32
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Captain Rufus posted:I haven't had much time or happy joy brain to get more poo poo done with my Atari 800 and its gaggle of games. Stonekeep is a really awesome, underrated game. I wish I had the full thing like you, but all I have is the version that came with the Ultimate RPG Archives. (and then bought it again on GOG, go figure) Once you get past that 90s live-action jank and somewhat...dumb dialogue, there's a really great dungeon crawler under all that. Also the combat system is surprisingly sophisticated under the hood. Stuff like your combat skill deciding how close to the exact point you click on an enemy getting hit, and hidden values denoting your skill with an individual weapon--not just weapon type, although that's taken account of as well.
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May 30, 2014 12:41
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Payndz posted:The only Apple ][ I ever saw as a kid belonged to a school, and not even my school; I saw it at some open day event running a maze game. But then I'm in the UK, and Apples were stupidly expensive over here - the Ł price was probably the same as you'd pay for an Apple laptop now, and that was in 1982 money. Haha, I have the exact same experience but with a BBC micro. I went to a small Catholic elementary school for like a year and their kinda slapped together computer room included Commodore PETs and a couple BBC Micros among the requisite Apple IIs, only time I've ever seen either one in person. I only remember the BBC because of the owl logo, I seriously questioned my memory until I found out they were actually distributed in the US, particularly to schools. EDIT: I seriously think the Micro and acorn stuff in general is super cool and wish it had a bigger (or any) US presence at all. They didn't have the huge libraries of other systems but they seemed to make up for it with a small selection of really classy and polished games, especially on the Archimedes systems. d0s fucked around with this message at 14:07 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 14:00
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Interesting thread, I am sort of a collector of old computer stuff. My main "retro"-rig is an Amiga 2000. I did not score this computer on eBay some time ago but actually I am still the original owner who got this computer as a present in 1987, it's introduction year. In it's original configuration it is basically an Amiga 500 with "Zorro II" (Commodores rough 100-pin equivalent to ISA, although not compatible!) Slots for expansion cards, with 512 kb Chip-RAM, 512 kb slow RAM and a RTC. (Realtime Clock, not all computers back then had a clock which could save the date) While the Amiga 500 was more a computer you'd find in kids' bedrooms (and one who was very successful at that) The Amiga 2000 belonged more in the professional Lineup (like the later 3000 and 4000) of commodore, as serious, expandable work station. Even NASA used them, and they also saw action in video production because of some unique features of their architecture. I could show pictures of my case now, but seriously, you can just google them, they look all the same and most pictures on google are better than what I could take. Contrary to the Amiga 500 it comes in a proper desktop case with a plastic front but a metal case, plus with external keyboard. It has internal room for two 3,5" drives and one 5,25" drive. The case generally is very roomy and allows for the usage of big cards and quite a few HDs, and that's quite important as old Zorro cards tend to be quite big. The interesting thing about Commodores Zorro-Bus was that it had something called "autoconfig" from it's 1985 prototype on, which did the same thing as PCs "plug and play" technology many years later. Contrary to PCs though, autoconfig actually worked from the get go and expansion hardware conflicts were basically unknown in the Amiga world. The Power supply with 220W was very big for it's time, and lent to the credo of expandability. The very first A2000 power supplies (like the one of this computer) were made in germany (west germany, that is) and of quite high quality. After a few years I expanded the computer with an IDE HD-Controller (which was quite rare in the Amiga world, SCSI reigned supreme) and a 80 MB harddrive. I think this little upgrade costed about a thousand dollars in modern bucks. It was amazing to have a harddrive though, disk swap orgies were finally in the past for more demanding software and 80 MB was HUGE. (btw. .. I still have the HD, and it still works) The harddrive also felt really fast compared to disks, even though the Controller only did PIO and couldn't even do DMA accesses, not that it would have mattered with a 68k CPU. Sadly, the 68k CPU with 7 Mhz started to show it's age fairly quick in combination with a Harddrive. All I could get was a small 14 Mhz 68k accelerator ( I sadly don't have anymore, it was quite an interesting expansion, with optional FPU addon) and expanding with an proper accelerator card (with a faster 32 bit CPU and more RAM, you could just plug it into the Amiga) was way outside of my means. The IDE-Controller also could take some FastRAM, which provided the biggest boost. (In the world of Amigas, there are three memory types: ChipRAM, SlowRAM and FastRAM, more on that later) Then the software offerings started to became spotty in the early 90s as developers left in spades to develop exclusively for PC. I got an A1200 (which I don't have anymore) but it felt like kind of a joke, the AGA chipset was not really impressive compared to flicker-free, non-interlaced VGA on real computer screens and millions of colors on the PC. The stock CPU was still slow and horribly outdated already when the system appeared. CPU-Expansions were still outrageously expensive (and 3rd party). Software was still lacking. Commodore made some more (even back then) questionable business decisions (that also ultimately lead to their demise) and I ended up getting rid of the A1200 shortly after getting it and getting a spankin' hot and new 486 with 50 Mhz and 4 MB RAM and belonged to the group of people that gave up on the Amiga. IIRC the "Killer-App" that finally broke me and gave me resolve to switch over to the "IBM-clones" was Day of the Tentacle, when it was announced there would be no Amiga version. Shortly after my switch Commodore went bust (and Apple was constantly in the red) and I did not regret my decision to put my money on the winning horse. For a while I wanted to get rid of my A2000 as I didn't use it anymore, but couldn't as there were too many memories attached to that machine. So I kept it, not in some moist basement but always in normal "human temperature controlled" living space. One interesting thing old computers did differently is having not a coin cell for supplying power to the clock when the computer was switched off, but actually having a proper rechargeable battery that would get recharged as long as the computer was turned on. Usually these Batteries were NiCd (Nickel-Cadmium) Batteries which are ridicously toxic for modern sensibilities and banned in europe for the use in consumer products for that reason. NiCd had the advantage that they could be charged and discharged very often and that their voltage stayed pretty stable until almost fully discharged. The problem is that these batteries tend to leak with age and no use, and that what they leak is highly corrosive, which damages quite a few old computers. As the A2000s (among other clock-containing Amigas) had all NiCd batteries, they often get damaged by a leaking battery. In a bad case it can look like this:  (the green part is corrosion, this is not my Amiga btw.) The stuff is so corrosive that it eats right through the Paint on the Mainboard and then even though the copper traces, completely dissolving them which makes the computer stop working. Often the damage is not as bad as seen though, and as Commodore publicized all electrical schematics and the Amiga 2000 is only 2 sides and has no layers in the middle, it is fairly easy to repair. The whole System operates on a 7 Mhz Bus and signal interference through rewiring of some traces is really not an issue. If you have an Amiga with a clock, please check the battery. Also on this picture, you can see the slots. The rightmost slot at the upper right corner is the video slot, for dedicated video hardware. This slot was very interesting for video editing and genlocks. Computers at that time were simply not fast enough and did not have the capacity to work realtime with digitized video data, so you would develop specialized hardware for such tasks that would manipulate video signals directly in specialized chips. With the Amiga, you could do this very nicely as it was basically laid out around TV's PAL/NTSC and had a very clean timing design. You could do then neat effects, like splice rendered effects from the Amiga into the video signal, cut multiple video signals together, make neat screen wipes, make color key replacement (blue and green boxes) and overlay them with video etc. and all of that in real time! Amigas and especially the Amiga 2000 were very popular for such tasks in the late 80s and early 90s. If you watched TV in that time, and the TV station had scrolling text in the news or a Station logo in the upper corner of the screen, there is a very good chance that this was made by an Amiga through the usage of such specialized hardware in the video slot. Ridiculous today and possible with any old PC, but an amazing technical feat back then.   This is a rarer one of such cards which gets stuck into the video slot, the OpalVision. Designed by a company in Australia, it was meant to be a "Video Toaster killer" but the expansions (including the "roaster" chip which would contain a set of special effects) never materialized and the Company went bust. It Contains it's own RAM, RAMDAC and FPGA and is basically a screen-buffer/primtive graphics card of sorts. The OCS Amiga Chipset was limited to 32 colors in normal screenmodes, this card with it's own RAM could do up to 24 bit true color with it's own Painting Program and Animation suite, which was pretty cool and looked like this:    There are several things happening in those pictures. While the interface (the buttons, the mouse cursor) etc. is drawn by Denise (the graphics chip of the Amiga) the actual pictures and colors are drawn by the OpalVision. The OpalVision then splices those two signals together and outputs them over it's RGB connector. Nifty! This card costed about $2000 at the time of release. The big, long chip in the middle is the 7 Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. (CPUs back then didn't eat much power and didn't get very hot, so they did not need to be cooled usually) The design of the 68k is actually from 1979 and it was already not an especially fast CPU when the Amiga was released. It was a very popular CPU though and used in many different Systems. This is not where the magic happened in the Amiga and many people falsely attribute the Amigas superb performance to this chip. The real performer in the Amiga was the quadratic "Agnus" Chip in the middle of the Board. It was a customly designed Chip by Commodore and manufactured by MOS Technology (later also known as Commodore Semiconductor Group) an Pennsylvania-based company and Commodores in-house Chip fabricator. The Agnus contained a Blitter which could very quickly (for that time) copy blocks of data inside the ChipRAM of the Amiga and do certain drawing functions completly by itself directly into the memory (ChipRAM) freeing the CPU for other tasks. This is what made the AmigaOS GUI so responsive, even when the CPU was busy. It also contained a graphics co-processor (called "Copper") and the memory/DMA controller, through which the other chips in the Chipset could do their own operations completely inside the ChipRAM, needing no CPU intervention. Early versions of the Agnus could only support 512 kb ChipRAM while later versions could support up to 2 MB. The Downside with the ChipRAM was that CPU and Custom chips would have to share access, making things kind of slow for the CPU, especially when the CPU was upgraded to a faster Model through the various CPU expansions that existed. That's where FastRAM came into play, it was RAM (usually sitting on RAM-Expansions going into the slots on the left) That was exclusively accessed and used by the CPU, speeding things up considerably. As Zorro II was 16 bits wide, there was a limit to this performance increase. This was OK for the original 7 Mhz 68000 CPU though, as it was a 16-bit-bus CPU. If you got a CPU expansion, it was important that you had FastRAM, else the faster CPU would have been damned to wait for access to the slower ChipRAM, basically completely wasting the additional performance and making the upgrade kind of pointless. Most memory expansions for the Amiga 500 were SlowRAM (or Ranger RAM) which only allowed the CPU to access through Agnus (making it wait for accesses) but was only accessible for the CPU and not the Chipset. So you could say, all the RAM with none of the advantages. The Limit for Zorro II RAM was 8 MB. Most CPU-Accelerator cards with 32 bit Motorola CPUs (68020 up to 68060) came with their own FastRAM onboard, which provided 32-bit wide direct CPU access, bypassing the Zorro-Bus completely and making it extremely fast. These cards could also bypass the Zorro RAM limitations and could often provide up to 128 MB of possible RAM. A card like that looked like this:  (The very popular Commodore A2630 Accelerator card) You would stick it in the smaller slot besides the CPU and it would disable the CPU on the Mainboard at boot time. Often also you could disable the Card by holding down some Keys at boot time, giving control back to the original CPU. This was practical for Apps and Games that were dependent on the speed of the 68k CPU and would not work correctly/too fast on faster CPUs. The strange chips on the right of the Cards are the RAM (they are called Zip-RAM and have all their "legs" on one side arranged like the teeth in a zipper) all the chips in this picture add up to 2 MB of RAM. As you can see, this card has room for additional RAM, up to 4 MB. To the left you can see the CPU (the bigger, golden Chip) and the FPU (the smaller Chip) in this case a 68030 with 25 Mhz. They are usually seated under a Metal shield which I removed for this picture, for electrical interference considerations.  The CPU  The FPU Such cards were pretty expensive. Later ones often also came with a SCSI controller onboard you could connect a Harddrive to, turning the CPU-Accelerator card into it's own microcosmos. My Amiga 2000 has a Blizzard 2060 now, pretty much the fastest accelerator you can get for an A2000. It has 64 MB of SIMM RAM and a 68060 CPU clocked at 50 Mhz. Compared to PC that's about the performance of a slower Pentium processor. If there's interest I can talk a bit more about the configuration of that machine, as it is quite beefy and has some rare expansions, quite funnily probably the most expensive computer I own, the i7 I type this on included.   (the card, without RAM inserted. You already wanted to passively cool the CPU. I have a later, bug-fixed and die-shrinked revision 68060 on it now that doesn't get all that warm, this picture is a bit old. The 68060 was already a 3.3V CPU though and had an integrated FPU and MMU) If you looked carefully, you will notice the upper left corner of that Amiga 2000 Mainboard contains ISA slots. Yes, these are default PC ISA slots. They are only connected to each other and to power though, they are not electrically connected to the Amiga. So "What's the point of them?" you might ask. You could stick certain "PC emulator cards" (which weren't really emulators, but fully fledged PCs) into them and then have a PC inside your Amiga you could control via the Amiga. You could also add PC graphics and sound cards etc. to the other slots which this PC could then utilize. This was practical as there was zero compatibility between Amiga and PC and this way, you could transfer files etc.. Here is one of the more common cards:  (The A2088 by Commodore)  (closeup of the CPU, a licensed clone of the intel one made by Siemens)   (original intel 8087 FPU as ceramic, by golly these old chips had lots of gold) It has an 8088 CPU with 4,77 Mhz and 256 kb of RAM. The free sockets can be expanded with additional RAM and a 8087 FPU, respectively. It says "Emulator" but really is by all means a fully fledged PC on a card. I also have a 286 and 386 one, but no pictures on this machine of them. Because they were dependant on the Amiga side, they were not quite as fast as "real" PCs, especially the later cards. But before I end this long-rear end post I want to show another Mainboard. The Amiga 2000A. It was produced in my home country of germany and contrary to all other Amiga 2000s, was a multilayer board and a direct successor of the Amiga 1000, with which it shares many technical details. (While the more common A2000CRs [cost reduced] were successors of the A500) Commodore deemed it too expensive in production, and as far as I know, it has never been officially sold.   I removed some chips for cleaning, but I have them all. Some of the Custom chips for this board still came in ceramic packages:  (the cheapasses at MOS apparently were not so keen on gold) I hope this was somewhat interesting if not squarely in the realm of retro-gaming. I wanted to write a little of the serious hardware/application side of the Amiga as most people only know the A500 as games console. Still, there were quite a few serious applications and serious hardware for it. If there's any interest and I did not bore anyone to tears I can talk a bit more about the Amiga and the Soft-/Hardware side of things. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 15:27 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 15:07
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d0s posted:EDIT: I seriously think the Micro and acorn stuff in general is super cool and wish it had a bigger (or any) US presence at all. They didn't have the huge libraries of other systems but they seemed to make up for it with a small selection of really classy and polished games, especially on the Archimedes systems. I'm not sure it's true that there weren't many games - I had a pretty big box full of probably 100ish 5.25" floppies, each of which contained 3-10 games with a bootable menu system. I don't know how much of it was commercial software though. The BBC used to broadcast applications over teletext in the UK for quite a few years that you could automatically save to disk / tape with the right hardware; a good portion of it may have come from there. I was too young to understand these things at the time (I was 2 when we got it in 1983). There were some obviously commercial titles though - I vividly remember playing Elite, Granny's Garden and Manic Miner, for example. I really should recover this stuff from my parents attic and fire it up again, but I have nowhere to put it and far too much techno-crap at home already. Hell, I don't think I even have a TV that would take the analogue connector any more. E: ^^^ read your post after making mine, it's fascinating to hear about Amigas from someone genuinely knowledgeable. I was too young to fully appreciate the scene at any more than a superficial level. Would love to hear more about their serious applications. ..btt fucked around with this message at 16:58 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 16:36
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Police Automaton posted:I hope this was somewhat interesting if not squarely in the realm of retro-gaming. I wanted to write a little of the serious hardware/application side of the Amiga as most people only know the A500 as games console. Still, there were quite a few serious applications and serious hardware for it. If there's any interest and I did not bore anyone to tears I can talk a bit more about the Amiga and the Soft-/Hardware side of things. This was great! Keep going. I think it might be interesting to cover methods of getting software onto an Amiga in 2014 (like hard drives, CF adapters, USB solutions etc)
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May 30, 2014 17:05
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the wizards beard posted:This was great! Keep going. I think it might be interesting to cover methods of getting software onto an Amiga in 2014 (like hard drives, CF adapters, USB solutions etc) Absolutely. I'll probably link to that mega post on the front page next week when I am on the desktop and not the iPad. Lots of interesting info. Maybe more technical than the thread's intent but some people like that kinda knowledge.
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May 30, 2014 21:44
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The A2000 was probably the best Amiga ever, I keep hoping to find one cheap but know it's never going to happen, rad post.
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May 30, 2014 23:58
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Thanks! I hope some of the tidbits can be useful to someone. All that knowledge is also on the internet of course but it's often quite a fact that websites with a plethora of information just dissapear overnight and then that knowledge is gone forever, and sites like wikipedia or forums etc. often have information that is just plain wrong. I already said a few things about old computers in some GBS Threads, but those threads all kinda fizzled eventually.the wizards beard posted:This was great! Keep going. I think it might be interesting to cover methods of getting software onto an Amiga in 2014 (like hard drives, CF adapters, USB solutions etc) Very interesting for a retro gamer. Many people that get to know the Amiga in this decade as a retro gaming system gravitate to USB solutions on the Amiga, because it's what they know from the PC. In my opinion, USB on the Amiga is quite useless. Most solutions are very hard to find, quite expensive and then often relatively shoddy and unreliable. In general I can say this about most Amiga expansion hardware: If you are not sure what it does or can't think of a specific use for it, you probably do not need it to enjoy gaming on the Amiga. The amiga retro community is sadly full of assholes that make an extra buck off younger retro gamers that don't have much knowledge, by selling them complete junk they will never ever possibly need at a premium. One ideal configuration for retro gaming is an Amiga 500, with OCS/ECS Chipset 512kb Chipram and at least 512 kb expansion RAM. No CPU upgrades, no nothing. You simply do not need it on an Amiga used for gaming, in fact often it's quite incompatible. The programmers of most games had such an unexpanded machine in mind when they wrote the game. It makes sense, Programmers just could not expect people to buy $1000+ expansion Hardware just to run their game. Most games do not even support a HD and some will even crash or be unstable on anything that's not an 7 Mhz 68000 CPU and has more than 512kb Chipram and a Kickstart higher than 1.3. Luckily enough for the Retro gamer, those kinds of Amiga 500 are the most common and quite cheap to get, and contrary to some more problematic machines, do not need to get some soldering maintenance. It doesn't even have a battery that can leak! When you have this unexpanded and completely unremarkable A500, you can go three ways regarding getting those games off the internet and into the machine. Actually it is more than three but a few ways I'll just call "the old way" as one of the possibilities, which means via serial cable from a PC, special disk transfer Programs with special hardware etc.. Quite frankly, nowadays I would not bother with that anymore. These ways are incompatible to many modern PCs, are a pain in the rear end to set up and dead slow. Just don't bother. There are two more modern ones. The first one is the HxC Floppy Emulator. This amazing piece of hardware kit emulates disk drives. Not only for the Amiga, but for various Systems including the PC and Atari, the Sinclair, the Amstrad etc. etc.. You replace the regular floppy disk drive with it and insert an SD-Card into it, from which the drive emulator then loads the disk image you copied on it into the Amiga. The Amiga thinks it's interfacing with a floppy and this whole process is completely transparent to the Computer and therefore highly compatible. On the Amiga at least, it can also emulate two disk drives at once, which saves regular disk swapping with some games. You can literally load up an big SD card with every Amiga game that was ever made and never bother with swapping the SD-card out again. I have the HxC Rev F in my Amiga 2000 and can highly recommend it. It even comes with a little speaker that emulates the disk drive sounds surprisingly accurately. You can get it from http://www.lotharek.pl/ - he is reliable and ships worldwide. The price begins at around 70 euros and might seem a little steep, but it's worth it. The downside is that it's not an easy fit in the default Amiga 500 and requires some thinking and mechanical skills to fit. Don't buy it on eBay, it's more expensive there. A more comfortable solution is Individual Computers' ACA500. Individual Computers is a germany-based company that still to this day produces hardware expansions for the Amiga. The ACA500 is a 14 Mhz accelerator card (with the modern 68EC000 CPU) which comes with 2 MB of FastRAM. The most interesting thing about it is that it also has two CF-Card slots on it where you can directly insert PC-formatted CF-Cards which then can be used for data transfer or as HD by the A500. The whole thing is completely new and with warranty and everything. You can buy it from here http://www.vesalia.de/e_aca500.htm and directly from individual computers. (although in that case, I'm not sure if you can do that internationally) It is a very nice card with many features, for example you can expand it with a faster CPU via A1200 accelerator card, which can be fitted directly on it, in case you ever need more power. Many old A1200 accelerator cards are reported to work with it, but individual computers also sells new A1200 accelerators that are guaranteed to be compatible with it. For Amiga games, the little 14 Mhz boost is usually more than enough to bring some of the laggier games up to a good speed. You can also switch the card to 7 Mhz for compatibility purposes. It's also very easy to install, you just stick it into the side of the computer, no opening of the machine required. This is probably the best "all-inclusive" solution there is, and I can't really think of any downsides, except maybe that it's not "classical hardware" in the strictest sense. Individual is also currently working on the ACA2000 which is the same thing for A2000 computers. They also make a very nice internal hardware expansion for OCS/ECS-Amigas called the Indivision ECS. Search it on the linked website, it's basically a modern VGA-Output/Scandoubler/Flickerfixer for the Amiga and enables it's usage with almost any modern PC-Monitor. Quite steep with about 100 Euros, but it has some nice features. Again some manual assembly is required. There's also the Micromys Adapter, which makes it possible to use optical PC-Mice with the Amiga. The Mouse is required to speak the PS/2 Protocol though. It won't work with your Razr xxxtreme 3d Gamer 30-Button Mouse, but it might work with your older optical Logitech USB mouse. (with PS/2 adapter) Makes Shufflepuck Cafe quite easy, and is a must when you do Pixelart on the Amiga. I can't imagine going back to an old Trackball mouse anymore. You can then set the ACA500 up with WHDLoad. WHDLoad is a piece of software that allows disk-based Amiga games to be run from the Workbench off the HD in a way that you can also quit them without rebooting the computer. It's a very useful tool to run games without using disks at all. When you start off as a Retrogamer with the Amiga, often the A1200 is recommended, because it is a bit beefier, Accelerators are easier to get, it has an integrated IDE controller and it has the AGA chipset and can run all Amiga games, while the A500 only has OCS/ECS and can't run AGA-Games. I cannot support this recommendation. First of all, there are only comparably few AGA games, as the Platform Amiga was already dying at the point the AGA Chipset came out and not many developers bothered to make AGA games. Most AGA games are PC-ports anyways that not rarely run quite shittly and also look bad compared to their PC equivalent. If you can't think of a special AGA game you just have to run on classical hardware just do not bother. Also A1200s are computers with SMD components and their electrolytic capacitors are leaking at this point. If you don't possess the soldering equipment/skills and know-how to replace them, your A1200 will eventually fail. Don't believe what the seller says, every A1200 is affected and the problems can range from instability to no operation at all. The leaking capacitors also cause damage to the mainboard, without a skilled eye it can be sometimes quite difficult to guess how big the damage is. On top of that, the A1200 also has quite the chaotic design which went through many revisions and sub-revisions, and was produced in the cheapest possible way (both Commodore and ESCOM who took over the production after Commodore had financial troubles) meaning that some have problems with stability in combination with accelerator cards or do not work with some specific cards at all, without soldering modifications. Some also have graphical glitches in certain screenmodes that can only again be solved by soldering. It's also impossible to say which A1200 Revision is affected and which not, as they were equipped with different chip revisions and even passive electrical components etc. unconnected to the mainboard revision. The Power supply also almost always is a problem, too. It can be a fun Machine and I have several ones I fixed, but if you aren't prepared to fiddle around a lot and spend some money, just don't bother, you'll just become frustrated. I hope some of this fits better to the retro gamer thread and has helpful pointers, soon I'll write some more about "serious" Hard/- and Software. I can also say a few things about C64s and classical PCs if anyone is interested. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 00:09 on May 31, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 00:03
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Police Automaton posted:The amiga retro community is sadly full of assholes that make an extra buck off younger retro gamers that don't have much knowledge, by selling them complete junk they will never ever possibly need at a premium. One ideal configuration for retro gaming is an Amiga 500, with OCS/ECS Chipset 512kb Chipram and at least 512 kb expansion RAM. No CPU upgrades, no nothing. You simply do not need it on an Amiga used for gaming, in fact often it's quite incompatible. This is so true, I use a PAL A500 with nothing but the RAM expansion for non-AGA(most of the good) Amiga games. I just put the ADF files on a CF card and write them to floppies on a 1200, which I also swap in to play the 5 or so good AGA games. EDIT: Not really recommending this method as you need a 1200, just explaining how I do it. If I didn't have the 1200 I'd probably use a Catweasel to write floppies since I like playing legit games too, and don't want to remove the FDD. Most people should just get a floppy emulator. d0s fucked around with this message at 00:51 on May 31, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 00:21
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Captain Rufus posted:My Atari 800 still needs a BASIC cartridge so I can properly use it and test out the disk drive and tape drive. I have just been kinda cheap. Also I love the idea of Day of the Tentacle as Police Automaton's tipping point/killer app moment. Though I suppose the only reason I first upgraded to a dedicated 3D card after years of denying its necessity was ... Ultima IX. Hmm.
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May 31, 2014 08:49
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Quarex posted:Though I suppose the only reason I first upgraded to a dedicated 3D card after years of denying its necessity was ... Ultima IX. Hmm. Ahaha you poor bastard.
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May 31, 2014 09:12
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Quarex posted:I am confused. I thought the Atari 8-bit line had BASIC built in ... or was that because I only had an 800XL and then an XE? Or do I misunderstand what you are actually saying you are doing? Nope. 400-800 had Basic as a separate cartridge. Hence that whole holding down the Option key to load a lot of programs on the XL and XE. I would be showing my recent retro pickups for non Atari computing but both Picasa and Facebook don't want to let me copy image urls because they are being butts.   Or you know I could just loving brute force copy it. The world needs to see my cheap as poo poo PC game pickups over the last few months. This all cost about what the Copy of Close Combat for the Atari 800 just went for that I got outbid on. I'm a cheap poo poo. It went for 21 bucks pre shipping. Oh well. Next time Gadget. Plus you know, tires next week. Captain Rufus fucked around with this message at 10:07 on May 31, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 10:02
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Police Automaton posted:Very interesting for a retro gamer. Many people that get to know the Amiga in this decade as a retro gaming system gravitate to USB solutions on the Amiga, because it's what they know from the PC. In my opinion, USB on the Amiga is quite useless. Most solutions are very hard to find, quite expensive and then often relatively shoddy and unreliable. In general I can say this about most Amiga expansion hardware: If you are not sure what it does or can't think of a specific use for it, you probably do not need it to enjoy gaming on the Amiga. The amiga retro community is sadly full of assholes that make an extra buck off younger retro gamers that don't have much knowledge, by selling them complete junk they will never ever possibly need at a premium. One ideal configuration for retro gaming is an Amiga 500, with OCS/ECS Chipset 512kb Chipram and at least 512 kb expansion RAM. No CPU upgrades, no nothing. You simply do not need it on an Amiga used for gaming, in fact often it's quite incompatible. The programmers of most games had such an unexpanded machine in mind when they wrote the game. It makes sense, Programmers just could not expect people to buy $1000+ expansion Hardware just to run their game. Most games do not even support a HD and some will even crash or be unstable on anything that's not an 7 Mhz 68000 CPU and has more than 512kb Chipram and a Kickstart higher than 1.3. Luckily enough for the Retro gamer, those kinds of Amiga 500 are the most common and quite cheap to get, and contrary to some more problematic machines, do not need to get some soldering maintenance. It doesn't even have a battery that can leak! I have only used a Gotek USB floppy emulator with my A500 and I love it, I think it's probably the best cheap solution if you have the tools & time to flash the drive. Here's a post I made: the wizards beard posted:Finally got to try this. I think it costs less than 20euro for the entire setup.
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May 31, 2014 14:29
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I heard about the Gotek floppy thing a while ago, didn't know that it worked fine now with the Amiga, yes, that is a possible (and very cheap) solution too. I still would prefer the HxC simply for the fact that it is a bit nicer with the menu and also comes with sort of a "starter" disk that lets you navigate and select the disk you want to load. I also really like the emulated floppy sounds and track display. Depends on what you want to spend I guess. The problem with both is that they are not an easy fit in an A500 case. I have seen very nice modifications for the screen etc. but at the end of the day, all come down to cutting into the case which is not exactly easy and can get ugly very quick. Also I personally think you should not case mod such old computers, these cases are not made anymore. I'm fairly certain you could also connect these disk emulators to the external disk drive port of the A500 and with a bit of rewiring, use it as DF0:. You could use the case and cabling of an old external floppy drive for that, at least the Rev F should fit into the case of the original external commodore floppy. These are also very cheap to get. (Don't know about the Gotek) This might be the cleanest solution that doesn't involve an open case or cutting plastics, you would have to rewire some Pins on one of the CIA chips though. I can look into it if somebody is interested.
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May 31, 2014 15:08
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Yes, the modified Goteks have been run in external drives, I'm not sure if they can be run as the internal disk without modifications. There might be compatibility problems. The Gotek doesn't use the same mounting hardware as the original a500 drive, so yeah it's loose inside the a500 case. I ended up just running longer power and floppy cables out the floppy drive opening and running it externally. The Gotek has a menu system, if you boot to disk 0 you get a menu that allows assigning of the disk images to disk numbers. The only thing it's missing is a character LCD, I would like to be able to see the name of the current image. If the source is eventually released I might try to add LCD support. http://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/
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May 31, 2014 15:30
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Police Automaton posted:I'm fairly certain you could also connect these disk emulators to the external disk drive port of the A500 and with a bit of rewiring, use it as DF0:. Any more info on this? If it's reversible I would love to build something like that, I even have a broken external floppy drive. I just don't want to screw with my A500 at all because it's pristine (warranty seal was intact when I got it) and I also don't like irreversibly modding old systems. It would be totally awesome to have an external floppy emulator acting as df0 though, holy poo poo 
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Jun 1, 2014 02:42
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d0s posted:Any more info on this? If it's reversible I would love to build something like that, I even have a broken external floppy drive. I just don't want to screw with my A500 at all because it's pristine (warranty seal was intact when I got it) and I also don't like irreversibly modding old systems. It would be totally awesome to have an external floppy emulator acting as df0 though, holy poo poo Its reversible, but I should have been probably more clear: The rewiring has to happen inside the Amiga as the needed signals are not at the disk drive port. It is about soldering a socket adapter you stick between the Amiga and the even CIA chip, switching around the SEL-Lines of the chip making it think the external Drive is DF0: and the internal is DF1: (it'd be better to disconnect the internal drive then, though, as some games will demand to have their second disk inserted in DF1: making you look like a doofus for not having actual disks). You could probably bend the legs of the chips even without doing any soldering, but I wont advise that. I can explain the procedure but I have the feeling it is not what you are looking for. About the warranty seals of the old Amigas: I know people who have literally rolls with thousands of them. Even then, they are *very* easy to print default warranty seals. They dont make the System more valueable for collectors, and even if they would, there are so many A500s around that they will probably never become rare in your lifetime. I hear about the warranty seals pretty often and always feel the need to point that out. There are quite a few people that do not want to open up their A500+/A600/A1200/A2000/A3000/A4000/CD32 etc. and all these computers get slowly eaten away by leaking batteries/capacitors on the inside as a result. If you have anyone of these Models and it hasnt been reworked, you need to do this now. There are no exceptions. Just because it still turns on, it does not mean it is ok. Even any A500 memory expansion with a clock you need to take a look at, as the leaking battery can damage the mainboard. Actually, as robust and objectively better designed the older Amigas (A500/A1000/A2000s) are, (ok maybe the A1000 not so much as there is still a lot of discrete stuff going on and tolerances can sometimes be terribly high) they often suffer from failing power supplies. Rework here is adviseable too, but not something an amateur should do. Generally though, I can just advise everyone who spends lots of time with retrogaming to pick soldering up as a skill. Even if it is just to make some cables. It is an incredibly handy skill to have in many situations even not involving retrogaming, and you do not need an degree in electrical engineering to do it well. It can also save you a lot of money by being able to repair everyday devices you would have normally thrown away. The costs for spare parts are often even in the cent rage!. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2014 14:27
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So friend is giving me the Commodore 64 for free! Is there a megapost or any info on what I need to make the thing pimped out for tons of games? Do they support SCART output?
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Jun 1, 2014 15:07
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