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What's the best path to Amiga emulation these days? I know WinUAE, but I don't know if any of those more-or-less legal packages are still around that give you things like "a desktop" and "a configuration that lets you play games" without 6 hours of futzing with emulator settings and swapping Workbench disks.
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Sep 27, 2015 17:37
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Captain Rufus posted:Or if Amigas still give you emulation headaches and you don't want to hope some polish exe files with a win UAE shell cover your chosen game and PC ports just don't cut it for you STeem for Atari ST emulation is gobs easier to setup and is generally the same game with less colors. Though sometimes faster than the Amiga version. I need to fix my old 520ST. It just goes diagonal black stripes when you turn it on. The drop trick used to fix that but then it didn't. I don't have any programs for it anyway. I do have a bunch of my dad's mid-80s keyboards that only have Atari and Amiga MIDI patch software. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 18:18
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Nintendo Kid posted:When I had my C64, I just stuck with good old "having hundreds of blank floppies at hand and putting disk images onto em, plus fastload" This was easy with the Apple II because 68K Macs could write ProDOS 800KB floppies. I had boxes and boxes of unopened Mac floppies I could reformat. But I don't have a 3.5" C64 drive.
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Oct 27, 2015 06:27
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I picked up a shrink wrapped copy of an ooooooold program called Spooky Monster Maker from like 1988 at Goodwill recently.
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Oct 31, 2015 20:45
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I was so mad when I found Pinball Construction Set for the Apple II in a box of assorted educational software and there was no disk in the (vinyl album gatefold-size) packaging.
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Nov 28, 2015 08:25
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Ordered a Rainbow TOS upgrade for my vaunted 520ST. The computer broke a while ago (nothing on screen except black diagonal lines) and I'm hoping that fresh ROM chips would fix it. The ebay seller must have a stash of these things because it came with official Atari dealer installation instructions and an addendum pamphlet on thick paper. I can MOVE FILES and RENAME DIRECTORIES now! In addition, Rainbow TOS means it can read DOS formatted floppies. Thankfully I've got a pair of SF314 double-sided drives for 720KB of power!  Now I just need to find some software for this thing.
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Aug 9, 2016 23:52
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Hey, it works again. Unfortunately it seems I have the original original 520ST and you can't upgrade the memory in it.  I guess I have to go buy a 1040ST.
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Aug 11, 2016 19:56
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Well, this makes me feel better about getting a 1040STF, at least. Of course, my caveat is that using any sort of video display other than an official Atari monitor would basically be like pulling hen's teeth while trying to bike up a mountain, since there's no composite video output in my unit and its RGB is not the kind that is PVM friendly... Thanks! 720KB floppies are great and all (I've got a pair of SF314 drives) but what's the best solution for mass storage on an ST? Atari being Atari they used that wacky ACSI bus... I've got some Apple SCSI-2 80MB external hard drives if there's any sort of adapter for that. I'll buy an SD card adapter if I have to, I figure I can use it if I ever get a newer, faster Atari.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:54
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Kthulhu5000 posted:I admit I'm an ST novice, but the famedly infamous ACID POLICE mentioned good things about the UltraSATAN SD card adapter. That might be worth investigating, rather than trying to hunt down some more obscure (and hobbyist-made, most likely) ACSI-to-SCSI adapter and hoping your SCSI disks both work with it and are robust enough after all this time to last. I know they work, I used to sell Apple II and Macintosh stuff on eBay so I've got plenty of weird SCSI equipment. Still, AtariAge says that you won't have much luck with an UltraSatan on a 512K machine since GEM + HDD driver doesn't leave much room for anything else. There's a floppy emulator that's kinda expensive but works with anything that looks really interesting.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:31
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Kthulhu5000 posted:From what I understand, you can buy a cheap $20 Gotek floppy emulator on Ebay and then flash the firmware you need to it, which would make it cheaper. The downside is that the flashing is a bit involved, and you have to buy the firmware you want from the HxC author. I don't know if you saw this from the edited link I put in, but it's apparently an ACSI to SCSI-II adapter. Neat. I'll have to figure out what exactly I want to do since it looks like I really need a 1040 or some other model with upgradable RAM to play a lot of games. I still want an Amiga but those are drat expensive.
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Aug 12, 2016 05:41
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I'll probably end up buying one of those floppy emulators anyway, I've also inherited a TRS-80 Model II and triple disk drive unit from someone's garage and it's useless without any 8" OS disks. Thankfully it uses the same Western Digital floppy controller as every other 1980s microcomputer...
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Aug 13, 2016 22:34
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Anyone who would want to play them would just download a version for use with a modern Z-machine interpreter. There's no advantage to using the ancient disks.
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Aug 17, 2016 16:21
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Help. Is there a WinUAE for Dummies thing somewhere. I got hold of some sample disks and all I want to do is use ProTracker. I installed Workbench 3.1 onto a disk image but there's so many options in this thing for 40 different types of memory, graphics cards, aaaaaaag.
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Aug 21, 2016 01:11
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I ended up finding a site that has a bunch of premade hard drive images and WinUAE config a, just add Workbench. I've got a fancy A4000 setup with a bunch of music programs and a buttlord of sample disks now so I can start learning ProTracker.
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Aug 21, 2016 22:27
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What's the best solution for mass storage for a IIGS? I've got a ROM 3 model with a 4MB RAM card but no way to load software without throwing together an old Mac to go with it. I've got both SCSI and IDE hard drives of appropriate size laying around.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:58
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d0s posted:I just use ADTPro to load software onto floppy disks, I get floppies from here, their $25 for 50 800k used but guaranteed disks deal is great. Most IIGS games are actually designed to be booted from floppy the same way Apple II games are so I don't really see a need for a CF card or whatever, it's like the Amiga in that there's really not much reason to use the OS, and there really aren't that many great IIGS games that you'd need to deal with a shitload of floppies, one box of 50 is more than enough for me. Oh okay. I don't have an Apple serial to DB-9 cable but I do have a Super Serial card, DB-25 -> DB-9 adapter, and DB-9 to USB adapter! I've got boxes and boxes of IIGS disks (mostly just 4000 copies of Oregon Trail, thanks Sarasota County) too.
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Aug 27, 2016 01:37
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If you can dig up the Kilrathi Saga version of Wing Commander 1, it's fixed to run at proper speed on any computer.
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Sep 4, 2016 15:15
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How hard is it to upgrade the RAM in an XEGS? I ordered a SIDE cartridge and I don't want to miss out on any of the sick nasty games/homebrew junk for the Atari 8-bits.
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Sep 13, 2016 05:11
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Apparently you can just like any other Atari 8-bit but it's difficult because the MMU and OS ROM you need to replace are soldered on instead of socketed.
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Sep 13, 2016 23:45
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My SIDE arrived and it's awesome! I've got an SSD for my Atari now. Unfortunately it can't mount .ATR disk images without a memory expansion. I can still run BASIC and SpartaDos programs plus use the .XEX loader to run all homebrew that will fit on a 4GB SD card. A+ would order antique computer junk from Poland again.
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Sep 20, 2016 00:18
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I was under the impression that using 1.44 meg disks as 720K disks was unreliable due to 720K drives not taking into account differences in the magnetic coating.
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Sep 28, 2016 14:26
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Wasn't it ridiculously cheap by then and also you could get pirated games on tape way easier than pirating cartridges
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Oct 2, 2016 06:06
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Look what showed up today! Operation Pimp My 1040ST is proceeding well. I've got replacement keyboard silicone, 4 megs of RAM, a boot disk with TOS patches, a new serial driver, a 1MB RAM disk and Ghostlink, a USB mouse adapter, and two external 720K disk drives. Now I just need to wait for the CosmosEx to go back on sale and I'll have everything I need for Maximum Atari.
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Oct 4, 2016 04:26
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Oh Jesus, I didn't know you could run it as a Hackintosh. I did know that someone ported enough of TOS to the Mac that you can boot to a GEM desktop. I also read that for all his faults Jack was so committed to the idea of cheap computers for everyone that they shipped a whole lot of dirt cheap 65XE units to Poland after the Iron Curtain fell so that his countrymen could have computers, too. 
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Oct 5, 2016 19:53
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Looks like Spectre GCR cartridges pop up on eBay/Atari-Forum sometimes. It runs unmodified System 6.0.3 disks and can read/write 800K floppies but requires a set of Mac Plus ROMs.
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Oct 6, 2016 01:32
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I ordered an obscenely overpriced color monitor cable for my ST from Best. But now I can use my ST on my PC monitor in low and medium resolution! Now if I just had a hard drive.
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Oct 14, 2016 02:43
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Charles Get-Out posted:If you're willing to violate retro machine purity, I think Lotharek has a HDD replacement card that plugs into the standard slot and interfaces with SD cards for ~80 euro. I use one of his floppy emulators and it works really well. Yeah, my plan is to pick up a CosmosEx once the next run of them gets made. Until then I'm stuck swapping floppies. Since I've got 4 megs of memory I have a 1MB ramdisk in the AUTO folder of my boot disk and I wrote a program that will automatically extract a zip file full of programs to it using ST-Zip after the ramdisk is created. It is pretty cool using Devpac on a computer as powerful as a graphing calculator.
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Oct 14, 2016 04:42
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Yeah, lots of neat hardware projects going on in the 16-bit world. People are making ET4000 video card adapters for the Mega ST, insane accelerators for Falcons, hell the group that makes the 64-bit FPGA 68k clone Amiga accelerator is experimenting with a version for bog standard STFs with 256MB of onboard TT-RAM. Yowza. I even heard someone sent one of the IIGS 65C16 accelerator boards to a fab in China and received Gerber files to make another run of them. I want an OCS Amiga (Amiga 2000 I guess?) to play games and make music with but they're even more expensive than STs in the US. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Oct 15, 2016 |
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Oct 15, 2016 06:52
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E: double
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Oct 15, 2016 06:54
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Who needs FPGA accelerator boards anyway when you can just upgrade your OS with TURBO ST! ...okay, I'm still installing the 16MHz CPU upgrade I ordered once it gets here from Eastern Europe. There's lots of ST hardware projects that are actually useful out there.
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Oct 15, 2016 18:39
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I don't think the Amiga sold enough units in the US for that to be much of a thing. Yeah, there's plenty of ST modifications you can get that fit the time period or give you quality of life enhancements. For example the later STFs have the pads on the board for the BLiTTER chip from the STE. It's not much more than a hardware BitBLT implementation with DMA but it's still useful for certain applications and the desktop. With some small hardware modifications (you need a weird adapter for the non-standard PLCC socket and depending on board revision a few jumper wires) you can install a BLiTTER into a stock STF and speed up the graphics. You can also replace the slow onboard ROMs with a daughterboard that gives you faster access times and lets you switch between TOS 1.04 (games) and 2.06 (applications). You can install a board that lets you run the CPU at 16MHz or replace the WDC floppy controller with a pin-compatible one that can operate 1.44MB floppies. It's not all 68060s running at 100MHz with 512MB of TT-RAM.
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Oct 15, 2016 19:58
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I grabbed a few game disks for the ST off eBay since I don't have a way to write ST disk images, just copying the raw files back and forth to floppies. This rules out copy-protected game disks and many of the old warez menu disks have weird formats. Pretty cool to have some authentic games though. Look at the graphics on the Interphase label!  Unfortunately, no manual so I have no idea how to play Interphase... I gave the Klax port a go though and it's pretty fun!
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Oct 16, 2016 00:26
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I like these old computers because programming them is a challenge and it's really interesting to see how things were done on them. I don't think anyone's going to start using Falcon FPGA systems any time soon but there's a difference between that and a box that plugs into the cartridge port and gives you Ethernet, a USB port, and flash storage. There's lots of cool projects you can do with that and it makes it way easier to use and transfer files (and  ) in the modern age! I don't see any reason to use an FPGA board in my STF but sure I'll pop in a 16MHz accelerator to make it run applications faster.
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Oct 20, 2016 04:59
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Anyway I'm getting some extra  from work and I might want to pick up an Amiga for my 16-bit collection too since I like making .mod music which the ST can't do. I don't know much about the different models. What's the difference between the 500 and 2000 if I want to play all those fancy floppy disk games and make tracker music?
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Oct 21, 2016 21:16
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fishmech posted:You want one of the desktop-case Amigas, as someone buying an Amiga now, because they barely cost more and you don't have to deal with the hassle of a keyboard integrated into the computer itself, which isn't very comfortable on a modern desk. As the proud owner of an Atari 1040ST, I need a non-garbage keyboard. But at the same time I'm probably not spending $500 on an ET4000 video card. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Oct 22, 2016 |
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Oct 22, 2016 01:40
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Hands down the best upgrade I did to my ST is a set of new silicone plugs for the keyboard from Best. It turns it from a lovely 1980s keyboard to feeling like a clicky keyboard and they're perpetually on sale so they're not as overpriced as everything else they sell. My 16MHz accelerator (a replacement 68000 with a daughterboard soldered to it) came in but I'm not confident in my ability to unsolder the original 68000... What's the best place to find Amigas? Most of them I can find for sale online are European, broken, or $500. Anyone like Best or B&C around but for Commodore?
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Oct 22, 2016 02:07
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While I'm on the subject, I threw together a new boot disk for my 1040STF today. I managed to cram a TOS 2.06 RAM installer, a GDOS and standard monochrome fonts, Warp 9, the 19.2k serial fix, a 1MB RAM disk (which is why there's only 2MB free) and some other stuff onto one 720KB ultimate boot floppy.  Look at that graphical speedup! It's amazing what you can do when you're not Atari's programmers. I like how just with a simple desk accessory, VDI can now draw text 900% as fast. 
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Oct 22, 2016 05:41
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So basically it's safe to assume that any Amiga 2000 I buy that's not from a reseller or someone who specializes in retro junk will have a battery that leaked all over the motherboard.
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Oct 24, 2016 00:54
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Police Automaton posted:Fun fact, on the A1200 there's space on the PCB to be populated with a clock circuit and a (NiCd) battery, Commodore just cheapened out and instead added a Clockport where you then could add an buyable add-on clock module. (now often used for various other expansions) Selling a computer which has a HDD-Controller but no RTC was a dick move, because you couldn't expect your customers to use some network time thing to get their time, so your files had no usable dates if you didn't always set the clock manually. That's the kind of smart business thinking that went on at Commodore in their last years. Well I guess looking back now it's good they didn't add the clock circuity and that battery. Similarly, the early model STs had support for hard drives (via a not-quite-SCSI port called... ACSI!) and no RTC. The intelligent keyboard controller kept time for you but didn't have a battery. Enterprising people figured out how to wire an external power source to it. You could also get a battery-backed clock for the cartridge port or install a Dallas TimeKeeper chip onto the board through some hardware modification. quote:One of these days I want to get one of the machines of the evil fraction but as things are today I am afraid it'd just collect dust and that would be a pity. The good thing about them is since the OS is basically CP/M they can read MS-DOS formatted floppies and you can get software to them pretty easily. Most of the cracked games are on 800K or 880K menu disks that PC drives can't write though. My GoTek isn't here yet so I'm reduced to zipping disk images, putting them onto a floppy, extracting them to the ramdisk, and writing the disks with MSA. It's also pretty fun to program if you're a mega nerd like me. I have VBCC set up to target TOS and I've got a more or less modern C99 compiler and Devpac-compatible macro assembler. It supports AmigaOS too but I don't have one to write anything for other yet than WinUAE.
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Oct 24, 2016 16:43
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Police Automaton posted:Programming on the Amiga (can't speak for the Atari, as I said, no experience there) is really a thing you can't do "just for fun", you either go all in or you just don't bother, also the more OS friendly you go, the more of a pain in the rear end it is with AmigaOS. I've also forgotten a lot of stuff and I'm not quite up to the internals on the programming side anymore. I do similar things for the C64 though (or rather did, no time currently) because that's about the level of complexity I'm willing to deal with for "just for fun" things. You can also steal a lot of tricks from people who spent a lot more time here, without having to study code that's almost incomprehensible to the human mind. On the Atari it's easier because GEM is a pile of garbage. The window manager is a pain and there's no multitasking. That means you can take over the whole system for yourself! Of course you don't get shared libraries or anything like that... but there's also no chipset architecture to worry about for better or worse. I've done some Atari 8-bit programming and it was pretty cool to see what I could make its version of the blitter (the GTIA/CTIA, also designed by Jay Miner) do. Mixing 15 video modes on one screen on a system from 1979 is pretty cool.
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Oct 24, 2016 22:14
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